Lewis and Orwell on bad words

Or, that is, words for things we want to label as bad.

George Orwell, under the heading “Meaningless words” in his essay, written in 1945 but published in Horizon in 1946, “Politics and the English Language”:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

CS Lewis in his 1944 Spectator essay “The Death of Words”:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Let the reader understand.

Some years ago I wrote in more detail about carelessness with language and thinking, with reference to Orwell and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.