The renown of Orwell’s name is well demonstrated in the Orwell prize, a prestigious UK award for journalists who turn “political writing into an art”.

If, however, you refer to something they’re doing as Orwellian – and by extension a bit like all that horrible stuff in Nineteen Eighty-Four – odds are you aren’t aiming for their Christmas card list.įirst, the positive. If you call a person an Orwellian, they generally like it. What’s more, as well as being a word that is overused, over-stretched and hotly disputed, Orwellian is further complicated because it has two contradictory strands of meaning. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.” This is a word that no less an organ than the New York Times has declared “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer … It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque,’ ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It is a dipping of toes into shallow waters compared to the deep black plunge that is attempting to define “Orwellian”. But now that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is our subject, I realise that musing over the meaning of “Kafkaesque” is little more than wandering in the foothills. We were marvelling at its many applications and at just how often - and with how many subtle and not so subtle variations – the term is used and abused. This time a month ago on the Reading group, we were hunting for the meaning of “Kafkaesque”.

Too good to be true 1984