Language Political or Historically Based? Essay

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Note that inflated English has been more characteristic of the centuries preceding Orwell and of Orwell's own time than on the latter part of the 20th century. There has been a shift in linguistics. As linguists and historians of language have noted, the Western model of language follows the monological approach. The monological approach has roots reaching back to Aristotle who saw communication as one of rhetoric, namely persuasion, where communication was a strategy for influencing people and helping them see reason, or the truth. In this way, the 'other' became viewed as object, communication was one way (monological) and the objective was how to best seduce the other to one's way of thinking. According to some linguists, such as Alfred Taylor, this reduction culminated in reducing conversation, depersonalizing words, and converting them into ideas rather than seeing the complexity of the speaker behind the words. It also led to glossing over the complexity of the words themselves with their manifold messages.

In more recent times, however, linguists attempt to show people that communication is also about our unique perspective and interpretation of the world, not just about delivery and ideas, and that language (in all its multiplicity and complexity) serves as medium for conveying our slanted and biased perspective. The goal of language ahs becomes that of constructing a shared meaning. This is a dualogic approach and is the epitome of Orwell's insistence in that we present writing from the perspective of the other drawing into the other and assessing how we can best present our words in a way that the other understands us.

The duologic approach sees meaning in speech as a continual process rather than static and as personal and subjective -- since it focuses on the speaker and the context of the speaker rather than on the message given.

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People therefore become free agents standing outside the one-sided communication that the monological perspective sees communication to be.

The duologic approach has increasingly become the way that contemporary writers view their writing. Academicians are over and again instructed to speak in transparent writing on the level of the other so that the other understands. Business executives undergo expensive training in order to clean their language and present it on the level of the other. Today's linguistic habits have shifted in the opposite direction to those that they were at one time.

Orwell criticized the English language for politicizing itself and via using conflated words exploiting those who were less educated and literate. He saw the bloatedness of higher English vocabulary as a tool for controlling people of 'lower' spheres. Orwell's observation, thoguh accurate in terms of certain descriptive semantics, may have been more applicable to historical context than to political determinants. Language has traditionally been monological and this may have caused certain individuals to bloat it. Today, however, duologic communication has replaced the monologic model. It seems to me, therefore, that, whilst the English language may have terms that are political in terms of social construct, the tendency of writing in a contorted manner may be more historically-based than political.

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