George Orwell

 Orwell states that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought".

I agree with his statement. Orwell is not saying that all language corrupts thought, but it can corrupt thought. For example, west coast fires and hurricane Sally are major devastating events that are occurring in America right now, but the President's words are what is mainly being reported across TV News across the country. Newspapers are unfortunately a dying industry, and TV news are how most Americans are getting their news. George Orwell states that as we go off on a vertical limb, the facts that we are learning and reporting become less and less important from the real facts and importance in our lives today. According to "Why Public Schools and The Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down" by Films for Action, we as a population have become sheep, and we are herded, and we accept information, rather than try to make our own conclusions. In this way, the media and government are "feeding" us their language and news, when in reality this information is getting less and less important from the real issues we're facing. This language corrupts our thoughts, and makes us believe what we're doing isn't important.

In Sp!ked Online's article, Policing language, controlling thought?, it is stated in Matilda, a brilliant idea hit, or struck the main character. Sp!ked makes the argument that the language we use today is manipulative from the actual meaning. The character is not being abused or hit, but Sp!ked states that some people believe its phrasing is abusive to women. This is not true, but we should consider the facts. Saying inspiration hit someone, is not abusive to anyone, however, it does show that our words have changed in connotation over the years. We can use words that were originally words for bad things, such as hit, smack, and turn them into sometimes, even good things. This shows that our language can corrupt our thoughts on what words are bad or good.

In addition, TedEd's video, "What Orwellian really means" shows that in our lives today, we throw around words we don't even use correctly and in fact, the original meaning of the word could be completely different on how we're using it today. This shows that our use of our language corrupts our future language and how we think of the words we're using.