George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946)

  > one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some
    worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin,
    where it belongs.

Such a fitting sentence on which to end the essay, since "dustbin" is no longer part of the modern English lexicon, as far as I know.

The more I read Orwell's essays of the 1940s the more they seem like a master class in how to write, which means they are also a master class in how to think. The clarity and impact in his style are so powerful that it's actually shocking. Moreover, it seems to be aging well, so Orwell's reputation (specifically for this) has been increasing.

Other great examples:

http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose

Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is.

Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that.

Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.

it looks really nice! is there a way to see the source code on github or similar?

Google N-Gram analysis suggests otherwise, with dustbin more common in books in 2000 than the 1940s/1950s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwast...

However, it has be losing in relative rank to 'trash can'. I believe dustbin is far more common in British English than North American English.

This is gorgeous.