2 ms·
I 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
by nomilk 5y ago
I 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/