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Unfamiliar Words from Orwell's Burmese Days
- nomilk 5y agoI came across Orwell's Burmese Days while listening to the Econtalk podcast episode Hitchens on Orwell. I finally got around to reading it in 2015. Of the 210 words I hadn't encountered before, a small number (~10) were either familiar words used in novel ways (e.g. consent - Flory and the girl stopped with one consent, to look at the flowers; bladder - Nasty old bladder of lard!), or unfamiliar derivatives of otherwise familiar words (e.g. sinuous, seditious). All remaining (~200) words were ones I hadn't previously encountered. Excluded were proper nouns, since they were mostly fictional. When placed into Google's N-Gram viewer, some of the first 10 words show declining use since the date of publication (1934): https://tinyurl.com/2p8ujk7e https://tinyurl.com/2p8ujk7e Of possible interest: Hitchens on Orwell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Dg9T14c4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Dg9T14c4k Transcript: https://www.econtalk.org/hitchens-on-orwell/ https://www.econtalk.org/hitchens-on-orwell/