Publications and Research
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
8-4-2016
Abstract
A lot about Trump’s success, and about the new verbal armament he wields (not to mention the old of the rest of the political field) can be learned from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Trump may be a naif when it comes to language but, as they say, “out of the mouths of babes…. ” Though his own language reflects more closely William Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflowing’ than it does the considered speech and writing Orwell advocates, he has identified the weakness of his opponents much in the way Orwell did seventy years ago.