“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

These are lines from George Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language.

Written in 1946, it’s a warning about how words are used to befuddle or, in Orwell’s more concrete metaphor, how words are used to spurt black clouds of ink to envelop thought.

Memories of reading his essay surfaced again, when going through the Pharmacy Board of Australia’s draft guidelines for pharmacist prescribing of S4 and S8 medicines.