In a recent article in The New York Review of Books Tony Judt wrote:

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we dont feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (Its only my opinion). Rather than suffering from the onset of newspeak, we risk the rise of nospeak.I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughtsthe view from inside is as rich as everbut I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own rightand properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

Professor Judt passed away on Friday. The New York Times remembers him here.[Editor's note: We just posted Peter Steinfels's review of Judt's last book, Ill Fares the Land.]