>> > "Socialism calls up a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of
>> > Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest
>> > ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables,
>> > escaped Quakers, birth control fanatics, and Labour party
>> > backstairs crawlers. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured
>> > shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian,
>> > teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City
>> > to do his yoga exercises quietly!"
As vituperative prejudice goes, ya gotta admit this is mostly sterling stuff!
Here's another favourite Orwellism of mine, one which I've cherished ever since my erstwhile love, Cultural Studies, decided that language was the ultimate problem and, always the rebel, duly resolved never to express itself in anything recognisable as such again:
"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
> ... Orwell died at age 48 having subsisted on a diet of coffee, rare
>meat, > Guinness and cigarettes.
Ooo-er. First I discover I share the man's prejudices and now I find out I share his diet - by this reckoning I've got four and a bit years to finish this #!* thesis and squeeze that PhD bit in before the RIP bit.
'Night all, Rob.