George Orwell was a British writer who occasionally satirized contemporary overuse of polysyllabic loanwords. Simon Horobin (p. 60) cites his rendering of the Authorised version (King James Bible) alongside his own parodic translation of it into Modern English:
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, verse 11: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Orwell’s version:Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
The former is a plain sentence, full of monosyllabic words, while Orwell’s latter version virtually contains none of them. His is extremely long, made up of only one sentence. At first glance, the sense each passage makes looks different, yet what is essentially conveyed is the same. By altering the sentence into something grander, Orwell mocks perhaps the unnecessary effort by the contemporary.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language also cites the passages and other ones from his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), in which it notes that Orwell particularly disliked the words like:
expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous...
“Predict” is a pretty usual word nowadays, but others are indeed not used in daily conversations. Yet, I clearly remember that, when reading his novel 1984, I came across “clandestine” and I thought you wrote it here!
Works Cited
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.
Horobin, Simon. How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language. Oxford University Press, 2016.
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