Seventy-five years ago, George Orwell (1903–1950) published the most famous political essay ever written—and also the most widely anthologized essay of the twentieth century: “Politics and the English Language.” Millions of American students have encountered it in college freshman composition courses or in introductory rhetoric and political-policy classes. A 1999 study found that between 1946 and 1996 it was reprinted 118 times in 325 editions of 58 anthologies intended for use in college-level composition classes—and that number has probably doubled in the past twenty years.
Teachers and professors assign the essay for various reasons: to promote cultural literacy, to foster critical thinking, to introduce the “plain style,” to heighten awareness of euphemism and jargon, and to clarify the connections between politics and language. (One of the great ironies of literary history is that the essay was rejected when it was first submitted to a prominent London editor, George Weidenfeld, at Contact, only later to be accepted by Horizon, which was edited by Orwell’s friend Cyril Connolly.)
