To See Truly Through a Glass Darkly
C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, & the Corruption of Language
by David Mills
Even well-educated people are often startlingly insensitive to language. One reads, even in the better magazines, prose that clanks and clangs, in which words have meanings only in the sense that “Bob lives in Manhattan” is an address, in which all sorts of assumptions the writers may not knowingly hold are conveyed in the words they use without thinking. The words plant themselves in our common vocabulary and grow there quietly till no one realizes what they actually mean, nor how they change minds and actions by making some thoughts more thinkable and others less.
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David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things.
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