Can You Tell the Difference Between Orwellian Words and Real Corporate Jargon?

Author George Orwell is perhaps best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four, his prescient vision of a future in which an oppressive government surveils its population and punishes independent thought. Even if you’ve never read Orwell, you’ve probably adopted some of the terms he helped popularize, like Big Brother and thought police.

In that novel and others, Orwell had a knack for using language that sounds a lot like modern corporate jargon. See if you can spot which word or phrase is his and which belongs to the business world.

Orwell was born Eric Blair in June 1903 in the UK. His suspicion of authority was present in his youth, when he sent a dead rat as a birthday greeting to a town official and composed an insulting song about his school’s housemaster. Later, he worked as a teacher, dishwasher, and bookstore clerk before establishing himself as a novelist. Of the many words he introduced to the English language, his most familiar might be one that he didn’t quite coin himself: Orwellian, or something characteristic of his famous tales of authoritarian oppression.

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