It is surely a testament to a writer's importance when his or her name eponymously enters the language. This is an exclusive club and there are only a few examples that come to mind. The French Renaissance writer François Rabelais may be little read today (Pantagruel probably sounds more like a Portuguese breakfast pudding than a famous work to many modern ears), but the word "Rabelaisian" persists as a fancy way of saying "funny, but rather disgusting." Franz Kafka, who endures still, furnishes us with "Kafkaesque" (Kafkiano in Spanish, kafkaesk in German), a word whose meaning appropriately enough is rather elusive in a kafkaesque way, but which describes generally a pointless and disorienting complexity.
And then there's Orwellian (orwelliano, orwellien, orwellisch), a word that bounded into existence almost simultaneously with the publication of George Orwell's two famous dystopian novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Twenty years ago, Orwell and his eponymous adjective perhaps looked unlikely to survive the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet system as little more than a historical relic.
Eight years of the Bush administration, however, have breathed new life into the word. From secret torture memos and the extralegal detention camp at Guantanamo Bay to the bewildering malfeasance practiced upon the English language and the Us (or is it US)-against-Them mentality fostered during the Bush years – all this revived the full qualities evoked by the word Orwellian.
The appearance of a new edition of selected essays of Orwell (details here) has produced several considerations of his place in history and culture. Both Julian Barnes, writing in the New York Review of Books and James Wood, in a piece for the New Yorker (sadly inaccessible online) offer interesting perspectives that share at least one common theme: Orwell's irrepressible Englishness. Julian Barnes notes:
