George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language"

I admire the hell out of good essay writers. Orwell is one of my favourites. I've written before that the first time I read an anthology of his essays I was depressed for weeks because he wrote over and over about how WWII would force England into a kind of "Capitalism with English values" - a form of Socialism with the State controlling all means of production. And in that he was very obviously wrong. Reading his essays again, I'm more struck by the breadth of his topics than his politics. He published on the cost of reading books, the mating cycle of common toads, boys magazines, good bad books, other writers, the Americanisation of England, English public schools, and cet. His most common topics, politics and writing, come together in the fabulous and famous (tho not famous enough) essay Politics and the English Language.

In it Orwell contrasts the common uses of language and its political uses. It is commonly used for communication but its political use is to obscure, mislead, and generally lie. Near the end of the essay he gives six simple rules every writer should follow:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or a jargon word if you can use an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell's main theme in Politics is canned metaphors and stock phrases exclude proper thought. It is not only the reader who is lost; the habit of misusing language eventually leads to sloppy thinking. Orwell challenges his readers to use language correctly and creatively.

The reason I am so fond of this essay, aside from my semi-professional interest in language, is the implications it has on architecture. I should follow Orwell's example and grab a sample of archi-speak to critique. Problematically, the architecture community in Canada is very small so the probability I would know the author is quite high. Let me see if I can grab something international. This is from Architizer's A+ Awards:

Each wing has its own qualities, different from each other and yet seamlessly connected to the next. In this way the building acts as an embodiment of the journey of education, with less distinction of any prescribed boundaries between disciplines. The colour strategy reinforces the identity of the academic disciplines, universally enhanced by the richness of natural materials, such as locally recycled timber. Planning allows the building’s circulation to constantly return to the library at its heart, and in this way is physically and experientially in parallel with the educational ethos of the school.  

You want to take a shot at what that really means? I don't. I think I could puzzle some kind of meaning out of it but whether or not what I came up with was what the author intended, I have no idea. The more I read it, the more inconclusive it becomes. 

This kind of writing is typical of architecture. The problem, very generally, is architects are trained to think visually and spatially. There is a vocabulary that has been invented, borrowed, or stolen from other disciplines to allow architects to write and talk about what they do but it is difficult to use with precision. So words that have specific and important meanings get tossed around until they become as meaningless as "fascism" is today. As an interesting experiment, try substituting "oogeyboogeymanism" for "fascism" in anything you find on the internet and you will notice how infrequently the meaning of the sentence changes. 

Architecture is difficult to write about at the best of times. When the meaning of the words we use for the most fundamental concepts are debased by misuse it becomes impossible.