Let’s start precariously by taking exception to George Orwell:
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Perhaps this is partly true. Or sometimes true. Or true at certain points in history and for certain subjects. But it is almost surely not the right prescription for everybody, for every type of speech, as we wouldn’t want to categorically toss out all the verve and vibrance and persona and exaggeration and irony from our most dynamic storytellers—to simply remove every sliver of swagger, flair, bravado, virtuosity, and elegance from the page, in some misguided belief that underneath all that sparkle is the truth.
One difficulty of the Orwell position—that there’s a core underneath the inflated style, that certain phrases and Latin words merely polish an underlying meaning—is that it severs style from substance. But you don’t have to write very many sentences to realize that those two concepts are almost interchangeable. At a minimum they are symbiotic. How you write something is directly related to what you write—style isn’t a varnish that you add to your storyline after you’ve put the cold facts on the page. It is, instead, the manner in which you present those facts, just as a painter doesn’t add a smidgen of style atop a finished canvas but let’s the style emerge through every single brushstroke.
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