But the New York Times says its use “reduces Orwell’s palette to a single shade of noir. the totalitarian state in his dystopian account of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The OED defines it as “characteristic of Orwell’s writings, esp. Perhaps almost as abused as Kafkaesque is Orwellian. Kafka is not the only author to lend his name to an adjective - Merriam-Webster also points to Dickensian and Byronic, but there are many. Nightmarish and illogical is also what I’d have taken from a description of something as Kafkaesque, with an insectile undercurrent beneath it all (I don’t think that last bit is right, incidentally, but it’s what the word makes me think of).īut Merriam-Webster also admits that the word, which saw its first recorded use in English in 1946, “is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning”, a word that a columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail argued is “tossed around with cavalier imprecision, applied to everything from an annoying encounter with a petty bureaucrat to the genocidal horrors of the Third Reich”.
The dictionary defines the adjective, incidentally, as “of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings especially: having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”.
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