I'm about to go do something, but wanted to be somewhat critical; the result will probably be a bit all over the place and incoherent:
The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language.
Orwell says, ‘… while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ This as if dead metaphors simply materialized overnight, and never lived in the middle class. Unsurprisingly, several of the “dying metaphors” he cites are at this point in time essentially dead (Achilles' heel and hotbed, for instance).
He leads with “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” It's immediately evident, I suppose, that Orwell is a writer, not a scientist. Who is defined as bothering with the matter at all? “Most” is quite the weasel word, isn't it? A case study in phrasing things in a way that you can't really disagree with them. I'm a self-and-by-others-described lover the English language, and misuse and misspelling of words and phrases annoys me as much as text that is too complicated to follow, but I don't think it means the “English language is in a bad way”, any more than it did then. But then I'm simply not one of the “most”, I suppose, by virtue of disagreeing.
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.”
Let's grant that the language is declining. Is this assertion really clear? To whom is this clear? It's certainly not clear to me. It isn't clear that either side is true, or that it is false: indeed, the decline, or evolution, as I would put it, of language is likely inextricably intertwined with politics and economics and technological evolution and society.
He addresses this immediately after, saying “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”, and in doing so he renders his previous statement pointless, filler, not a meaningless word but a meaningless phrase!
To boot, he says: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” His hope for curing the language is the conscious action of a minority, but the decline of language cannot be due to the bad influence of a minority?
Orwell makes good points at times here, I think, with respect to overly ornate language that does nothing to clarify its own content. And he gives some reasonable guidelines to boot. But he extrapolates these smaller conclusions to bigger ones that are unlikely to be true, and presents them in a such a way that you don't realize that he's weaseling out of truly concluding anything—he simply postulates. Even when he does make good points about using language to defend the indefensible, the idea that this is some sort of novel discovery that was particularly bad in the 40s—or is now—is unfathomably foolish.
“I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”
What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric?
Really investigating the concept of worse or better when it comes to such abstract things as language is incredibly difficult. Distinguishing worse from different is incredibly difficult unless maybe you're comparing two things that were conceived at the exact same moment—and even then, your judgement is specific to the now, not to forever.
“Look back through this essay,” Orwell says self-deprecatingly, “and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.” Conveniently, this makes 90% of the essay immune to criticism. Another weaseling.
“Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.”
I'm afraid I must report to Mr Orwell that 67 years later, these metaphors are alive and well—or, more likely, dead.
Is our English today “worse” than it was 50 years ago? If not, was it a small cadre of noble writers who saved us? If the decline of language was arrested, was that because the language stopped declining, or simply because on this end, decline doesn't really look like decline—just movement? And if it is worse, then how? All of the complaints he's making seem to be equally valid today, but not particularly more so.
People have been trying to make points without having to really justify themselves for ages, and they will continue to for many years to come. It happens in politics, yes. But it seems that it also happens in essays about politics and the English language.