Politics and the English language by George Orwell directed to MCDonald's and Consumers

Dear MCDonald's McCafé and Consumers,

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

*Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
*Never use a long word where a short one will do.
*If it is possible to a cut a word out, always cut it out.
*Never use a passive where you can use the active.
*Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
*Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this artice.

(One of the five George Orwell quoted) I am not, indeed sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of the Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

George, it is possible to write the kind of stuff that you quoted, but like you said... One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase-some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse (Cubiclé, Mini Vané, You Mocha me Happy)- into the dustbin where it belongs.