Language and crime: When it looks like a spade...

How apt it is that a statue outside the London headquarters of the BBC is of George Orwell, since it’s possible that his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language has not been read by those in the corporation’s upper echelons whose job it is to advise reporters on the words they should if, at all possible, avoid using.

Orwell had studied the way the Nazis and the Communists in Russia had used a vocabulary the purpose of which was to sanitise murder, torture and the exercise of absolute power. “If thought corrupts language,” he warned, “language can also corrupt thought.”