Empowering or Cowering?: “Years ago, in a justifiably famous essay titled ‘Politics and the English Language,’ George Orwell pointed out that the way politicians use language tends to confuse the public and destroy the clear communication that is the basis of a true democratic politics. His novel 1984 shows how a totalitarian state can destroy people’s understanding of the meaning of words in order to keep those people in a state of oppression… For some reason, academic writers on the left, who, like Orwell, used to be champions of the plain style, today have hidden themselves in the thick jungle of some of the most impenetrable prose on the planet.” The Vocabula Review