I hadn't seen coming such an amount of humor and wit and cleverness from George Orwell, whom I imagined more bleak and sorrowful and depressed than this. I'm almost done reading instead a (quite huge) book filled with precious reasoning and useful thinking and historical material, and some of the essays contained in it are small masterpieces of the genre. Many of the political ones are -simply put- still very useful tools today, when the authoritarian "New world order" and a "totalitarian world" are in my view nearer than ever.

One essay, dated 11th december 1945, is instead about the decadence of the english language, as Orwell saw it happening chiefly by the spreading of political and technical jargon. The funny and wittier part of the article is when Orwell picks or makes up pieces of bad writing and puts them aside with simpler and clear-cut pieces of literature (such as the Ecclesiastes, for instance). Quotes from communist pamphlets and psychology and history essays are put together to prove the ineffectiveness and the "slovenliness" of modern english, whose obvious faults are: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words.
Then Orwell puts down six simple rules to keep your written language at bay from contemporary decadence, and I thought I could share them with you. I personally saw in them all the potential and actual defects of my own writing.

1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used in seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word were a short one would do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

In another part of the essay Orwell writes:

...political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck.. this is called elimination of undesirable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

I mean, everyone can see how the examples Orwell gives (and of the bad use of the language that defends them) could not at all still be used in our world today, could they.

Places have to be different by the one you know already. Lacking of superior talents in seeing and understanding, the average tired tourist --like I am being here-- should be at least compelled to search for anything that is different from what is already known. The more different, the better. Because cities and cultures have many strategies to organize themselves, so why assuming that one is better than another?
I don't appreciate very much all the things that make a city like Budapest similar to a city like Milan. Turkish Kebaps, Pizzerias, traffic, supermarkets, fashion brands, cell phones, sedan taxicabs, FIAT cars, the mafia of the public pissoirs raising money from your peeing, etc.

But among the things that are different, the most sweet in Budapest is the language. The sound of Hungarian language is so particular it is hard to find anything similar to compare it with. At first it may sound similar to a Slavic idiom, but it is a completely different thing.
Some syllable, here and there, sounds even Italian. 'Italian' is 'olasz' in Hungarian, by the way. Don't ask me why. It may come from 'oil', you know, olives. I don't know.

My first day in Budapest I bought a Magyar-Olasz vocabulary. I always feel obliged to at least try to stammer some word in the local language, just to let them know I don't take it for granted that they speak English. I studied two or three of those words walking around looking for a hotel on my first day.

Now I can say "Jó napot" to say good morning, "Jó estét" to say good evening, and, most important, "köszönöm" to say "thank you" (see if this is similar to any language you know). "Goodbye" is still too difficult to pronounce for a simple dyslexic like me. 'Viszontlátásra' is beyond my reach.
Anyway, it's a pleasure to hear this language spoken, maybe by two women chatting at the tram stop. Very often they seem to have a tender and caring attitude one with the other, very affectionate. And their language is the better music possible to this.

** what I really wanted to talk about in this post was the round sweet profile of Hungarian women's hips that so perfectly complete their long legs as they elegantly walk by, chanting for you their mute song as you walk by, but, you know, I reckon I must be a little too much fixated here. All right, I want to be loved by some Hungarian woman, what do you want. I can't help it.