English Grammar. English Grammar Reference and Exercises. English Grammar. The 50 Best Short Stories of All Time. 10-Minute Plays | Ten-Minute Plays. Poetry Season - Homepage - Discover and vote for your favourite poet. Treasures in full: Shakespeare's plays, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Gutenberg's Bible. Verb and Preposition Collocations. George Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. 1. 2. 3. 4. Level 330 Grammar Topics. Study vocabulary for free.