In praise of affectation

Aversion to pretentiousness was probably an English trait before Dr Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s arguments for the immateriality of the world by booting a stone. There are plausible historical reasons for this. Suspicious of the Catholicism of neighbouring Ireland and France (where words were thought to contain spiritual power even if they were not understood), the English easily adapted the Reformation’s injunction to simplify scripture into a more general doctrine of ‘say what you mean’.

This attitude is exemplified most famously in George Orwell’s essay of 1946, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in which long and Latinate words are anathematised. It ought to be read as a work of its time, prescribing a lexicon suited to the austerity of postwar Britain and expressing Orwell’s peculiar political gyrations. It’s still too often taken as a style guide of near-universal applicability — as though aspiring to an ‘air of culture and elegance’ were something diabolical.