Ummmm..........

...have to admit I was really hoping someone else would have posted their view so that I could respond to them, but here goes:

I always thought that Johnson was incredibly pompous (possibly due to his portrayal in Blackadder), so I was surprised to see his admission that despite his original mission being to catalogue the English language and in so doing 'put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition', it is unrealstic of him to believe that he can complete the challenge (phewth, sorry about that rather long sentence that Orwell would no doubt condemn as being egregious - new word I learnt today, and am so going to dazzle my great uncle Ian with on Easter Sunday!). Johnson goes onto explain why this is an impossible challenge, by claiming that trading with 'foreigners' leads also to an exchange of words, some of these are new and will infiltrate into the language. He sees the only way to prevent a language from changing is to create a completely isolated nation, removed from any other cultural influences. He predicts the unlikeliness of this achievement because 'every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words.'

I have to admit that I struggled with Swift's proposal, but I think he was saying that he wanted to undertake the task of refining the English language, and he registers that Greek, Latin, Chinese and other European languages beside English haven't changed, so why should English? Amusingly, he criticises poets for defacing English through their abbreviations when forcing words to fit with their meter and appears to be against the idea of phonetic spelling. I'm not sure I would endeavour to teach his dictatorial ideas.

Orwell, conversely, believes that it is virtually pointless to attempt to prevent the changes that occur to the English language. He appreciates the organic nature of a language but rejects the necessity for use of 'foreign' words in English. I very much agree with his point that modern prose struggles to be succinct (and as everyone knows, I fall foul to this tendency!), but I found myself asking the question - could he not have employed a little more brevity in his writing?

I agree that Orwell could have taken some of his own advice - but he does in fact criticise his own essay in this regard 'Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.' He doesn't explain why he has committed those faults, but perhaps it because language is a shared responsibility and he is advocating that more people need to improve their language for language to generally improve?