Society & Culture
First episode on George Orwell. My guest for this episode is my great friend Danica Weager. We take as our launchpad the Orwell essay Politics and the English Language. It's been a goal of this podcast to also talk about language and how we use it. Orwell is the perfect writer in this regard. In todays episode we talk about: - The ease of invoking names without understanding the underlying principles - The Liberal ethos "yes things are bad, but we can improve them" - What we mean by the words is more important than the words themselves - Part of the liberal ethos is to concretize your points with vivid examples - How nominalizing verbs makes language boring - How the disciplines that are mediated through people have the vaguest language - And how Orwell had the power to face unpleasant facts. https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/