The Rampant Misuse of 'Orwellian'

Nightmare or fantasy? A look at the often used (and often misused) insult.

A recurring theme of this column is that language is a giant organic beast, with thousands of tentacles and no sense of right and wrong. Nowhere is the amorality of language more clear than in the realm of eponyms, those words that turn a name into a new term, often in ways the bearer of the name would despise.
The best example might be “Orwellian”—an adjective that has likely made George Orwell spin in his grave repeatedly, ever since his name started being used as a synonym for the totalitarian doublethink he attacked in 1984. Recent uses of “Orwellian” seem to expand the term even further, as it joins “socialist” as a common weapon used by right wingers against all things Obama. Without a doubt, “Orwellian” is one of our most commonly and controversially used words.
Though Orwell was a prolific writer—you should really check out his essays—it’s the dystopian novels 1984 and Animal Farm that form the popular sense of “Orwellian.” The Oxford English Dictionary started finding examples of its use as early as 1950, one year after 1984 debuted. The OED also collects other meanings for the word, including “an admirer of the works and ideas of Orwell,” but that more flattering use didn’t show up until 1971, and the bulk of recent uses mean doublethink-y, newspeak-esque, and Big Brother-ish. It’s as if we called criminal scum “Batmanistic” because Batman is so effective in beating them senseless.
Though “Orwellian” is almost always a negative term, the targets vary. Often, it’s about language: Legislation like the "Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010” and disturbing euphemisms like "sudden in-custody death syndrome” get the Orwellian label. Writers make reference to “an Orwellian global corporate state” and the GPS-like Facebook feature “Places” is described as being “so Orwellian as to surpass even what Orwell imagined...” Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about a new weapon is called “exactly the kind of Orwellian doublethink that characterized the Bush administration.” Even the “end” of the Iraq war gets the Orwellian treatment, as Salon’s Hannah Gurman writes that the author "could not have invented a more Orwellian tale than the actual story of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.”
In particular, the recent “Ground Zero Mosque” hubbub has been the cause of many accusations of Orwellianism, as seen in stories like “MSNBC Masking the Mosque: Muslim 'Scholars' aka Stealth Jihadists, an Orwellian Freak Show” and “Associated (Orwellian) Press.” These stories equate the recent AP stand against saying “Ground Zero mosque” (because the potential mosque/Islamic cultural center would not actually be located at Ground Zero, just near it) with the Nazi-inspired totalitarian villains of Orwell’s books. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that is a stretch...

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Mark Peters @'GOOD'