The celebrated Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers recently released a new single called “Orwellian”. “We live in Orwellian times,” it begins. A hungover literary journalist in his dressing gown, as memorably described in Orwell’s Confessions of a Book-Reviewer (1946), might agree, but should anyone else?
People who ought to know better, including people who once sang about how “libraries gave us power”, have long used the word Orwellian as shorthand for “a bit like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”: ie an authoritarian dystopia. (Where, as the Manics have it, “Everywhere you look, everywhere you turn / The future fights the past, the books begin to burn”.) The original sinner, I am sorry to report, seems to be Mary McCarthy, who in 1950 the very year poor Eric Blair died – called a new magazine “a leap into the Orwellian future”. Norman Mailer adopted the adjective at the end of that decade, and it stuck.
This is very much not the normal function of eponyms: after all, Orwell was not recommending that we adopt his Orwellian vision. It’s as if we were to use Shakespearean to mean “approving of rape, murder, and cannibalism”, simply because such things happen in Titus Andronicus. An Orwellian practice indeed.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
