A rather trivial post:

Having recently read a collection of Orwell essays (review up soon), which included a re-read of /Politics and the English Language/, I’ve become a bit more sensitive to the sort of writing Orwell condemned there. It happens that I’ve come across a couple of really striking examples in books I otherwise liked.

The first is from Robert Nozick’s /Anarchy, State, and Utopia/ (p. 53):

In Part III, we argue that the conclusion of Part II is not an unhappy one; that in addition to being uniquely right, the minimal state is not uninspiring.

Two “not un-”s in one sentence! Interesting fact about the second one: while much rarer than, say, “not uncommon,” it seems disproportionately common in academic books as opposed to the web. The number of “not uninspirings” in Google Books is over 20% of the (admittedly small) number on normal Google, while the “not uncommons” in Google Books are 0.1% of of those on the web. Academics may be more likely to be “not uninspired” than ordinary people.

The second instance is from Steven Pinker’s /The Blank Slate/, a defense of the idea of human nature. He opens by pointing out that some writers have been vilified not for denying any importance to upbringing, but for saying upbringing and genetics work together to create personality. Then he explains the book’s purpose:

My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing–no one believes that–but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.

What Pinker means to say is he want to talk about how some people came to take a crazy idea for granted, and vilify something obvious. But instead he uses “moderate” and “extreme” as stand-ins for “good” and “bad,” an annoying, Newspeaky habit.