Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

For what it is worth, and I think it is worth much, read or review Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

I didn’t take many English courses in college (just one). While happy, at the time, to skip needless courses, I sometimes regret what I could have learned. Then again, I was young(er).

I was in my late 40s when I first read George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. I found the content amazing. It wasn’t all original as some of it came from other short and enlightening pieces on writing that I had previously read. Still, Orwell had a way of conveying concepts that cut the heart and mind.

Engineers, like myself, don’t read these types of things. That is probably a great shame. Then again, that may be the reason why engineers “get things done” so often. That argument is left to those who argue those types of things.

At my current age, I have the great urge to require reading of Orwell’s essay over and again and then writing about it to be a prerequisite for college and high school graduation in America. No one has asked me about such, so I doubt anything of the sort will occur. To this day, Orwell is too controversial. His thoughts and writings tend to say, “Look, the emperor has no clothes.”

One of the problems of our day is that it is not the emperor who has no clothes, but those who are supposed to be pointing at the naked emperor who have no clothes.