Great Britain
Shakespeare parodied the pretentious style, as in the speeches of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. The plain, or native style was, in fact, an entire literary tradition during the English Renaissance, from Skelton through Ben Jonson and including such poets as Barnabe Googe, George Gascoyne, Walter Raleigh, and perhaps the later work of Fulke Greville. In addition to its purely linguistic plainness, the Plain Style employed an emphatic, pre-Petrarchan prosody (each syllable either clearly stressed or clearly unstressed).
George Orwell’s 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" decried the pretentious diction, meaninglessness, vagueness, and worn-out idioms of political jargon. In 1979, the Plain English Campaign was founded in London to combat "gobbledegook, jargon and legalese".
Read more about this topic: Plain Language
Famous quotes containing the word britain:
“Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be “too clever by half.” The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.”
—John Major (b. 1943)
“It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.”
—Amos Oz (b. 1939)