A major theme of George Orwell’s 1984 is that the deterioration of language, or rendering words meaningless, makes people unable to think the thoughts necessary to preserve their liberty, leaving them susceptible to being controlled by lies.

Orwell also warned of this in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, in which he asserted that two poor attributes were plaguing modern writers: ‘The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision…’ These, he wrote, are caused by an over-reliance on ‘worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power’ and ‘the elimination of simple verbs; instead of being a single...