sad-disease.diaryland.com

I'm tired of this language. And I'm tired of writing. It seems I can't understand my own language anymore. Literally, I do not understand English.

I read an essay by George Orwell several years ago that outlined the mistakes authors make in order to decorate their writing. My favourite mistakes are pretentious diction and meaningless words. Orwell believes that authors use pretentious diction "to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements." I have to agree. Who doesn't love the thesaurus?

And what about meaningless words? It's no longer simple. A simple sentence has gone out the window. Every word in every sentence is altered and lengthed to be appealing and intellectual. But in the end there is no meaning. The example used is the word fascism. According to Orwell, fascism has no meaning "except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."" Is he right?

Then after the Orwell essay, I came accross Stephen King's book "On Writing." He says the worst mistake a writer can make is to dress up the vocabulary. Then he advises to "use the first word to come to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful." There's always another word -- a bigger word, But in the end it's spurious. Err, um, I mean fake. Ha!

Basically, essentially, I want to be a simple writer. But there isn't a thesaurus type book out there to help the simple writer -- to help dress down a sentence. How do you create a profound thought only using simple diction?

posted 2004-01-11