George Orwell wrote his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ a year after the end of the Second World War. He showed how the ‘debasement of language’ corrupts thought and, in the process, corrupts our politics. The standard view is that economic and political causes drive the decline of language. But the reality, as Orwell suggests, is that the decline of language may itself also be the cause of many political and economic problems. As he put it: ‘A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.’

Orwell was mostly talking about politics, but economics suffers from the same debasement of language. Indeed, Orwell himself understood this point well. In his novel ‘1984’, where language is tightly controlled to limit thoughtcrime, Winston Smith reads a children’s history textbook which asserts that in the time before Big Brother’s revolution: ‘the capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave’. Orwell was a fierce critic of capitalism, but he wanted to debate it on its merits, and saw that such conversations would be impossible in a world where the very word had been made synonymous with slavery.

...read more at capx.co