The English of politics is artificial, pompous, never fresh and vivid. Taking George Orwell's definition, it is a "mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence," it is "the defence of the indefensible," addressing certain events without suggesting mental pictures of them. Orwell's negative view on politics has been prophetic: during the last decades words like "politics" and "politician" have been classified among the English words carrying the most negative connotations. Writing a political speech, and reading it aloud, is a delicate issue: it must convince people to support one party and its...