Will Self has fired a gleeful broadside against George Orwell and his fans, describing one of the English language's most revered writers as the "Supreme Mediocrity", slamming the "obvious didacticism" of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and describing Orwell's acclaimed essay Politics and the English Language as "plain wrong".

It is a clash which might long have been predicted. Orwell is the issuer of the much-cited rule "never use a long word where a short one will do"; Self is the author who never shies away from exercising his significantly-wider-than-average vocabulary. Now, in a deliberately provocative essay written for the BBC's A Point of View, Self has laid out in detail his reasons for attacking a writer of such high standing in the literary pantheon, admitting – happily – that he doesn't doubt the characterisation "will put noses out of joint".

"Each generation of talented English mediocrities seizes upon one of their number and elevates her or him to become primus inter pares," writes Self, in the process defying another of Orwell's rules for English: "never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent". Self continues: "The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we've had many political leaders, we've got by with just a single Supreme Mediocrity – George Orwell."

The award-winning novelist says he likes Orwell's writing "as much as the next talented mediocrity", and has read some of his books "many times over", in particular the "quasi-reportage" of The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London with which Orwell made his name. "The fiction stands up less obviously well, but I can still find solid virtues in the skewed satirising of Keep the Aspidistra Flying or the unremitting bleakness of A Clergyman's Daughter and Coming Up for Air. At any rate they lack the more obvious didacticism of Animal Farm and 1984," writes Self. "As for the essays, they can be returned to again and again, if not for their substance alone, certainly for their unadorned Anglo-Saxon style."

It is this unadorned style, however, which has turned Orwell into the "Supreme Mediocrity" – at least according to Self. "Like all long-lasting leaders, he has an ideology to justify his rule," writes the novelist, citing Orwell's essay Politics and the English language, in which the Animal Farm author laid out much-followed rules including "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print"; "never use a long word where a short one will do", and "if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out".

"Orwell – it's said by [his] disciples – established once and for all in this essay that anything worth saying in English can be set down with perfect clarity such that it's comprehensible to all averagely intelligent English readers," says Self. "The only problem with this is that it's not true – and furthermore, Orwell was plain wrong."

Self's own latest novel, Shark, has just been published, and was described by Stuart Kelly in the Guardian as "intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling". Self, writes Kelly, is "of all modern novelists … the heir of modernism, seeking to regalvanise and reinvigorate the techniques and the strategies once deployed". In the novel, Self writes of how the character "Claude unties the tapes of his life vest and the kid – some poor stupid hick like all the rest… – raises his arms automatically so they slide down and out of the armholes… You're welcome – and would mister like to try another sports coat…? The hands are poised for a moment, Claude sees there's no skin or flesh on them at all, only cooked tendons stretched over white florets of knucklebones… then… it's the last roll of the dice, my friend… and they're gone."

In his essay for the BBC, Self writes of how language is changing, evolving, and of how this is a good thing. "The trouble for the George Orwells of this world is that they don't like the ways in which our tongue is being shaped," writes Self. "Orwell and his supporters may say they're objecting to jargon and pretension, but underlying this are good old-fashioned prejudices against difference itself."

Self says that "if you want to expose the Orwellian language police for the old-fashioned authoritarian elitists they really are", all that needs to be done is ask them whether Standard English or the dialect linguists call African American Vernacular English is more grammatically complex. "The answer is, of course, it's the latter that offers its speakers more ways of saying more things – you feel me?" writes Self, stating that "any insistence on a particular way of stating things is an ideological act, whether performed by George Orwell or the Ministry of Truth".