It\u2019s not just professors and snobs who deplore the decline of English. The great essayist and novelist George Orwell (1903-50) had much to say about the corruption of language\u2014and how it enables tyranny. The warning was clear: a distracted populace with diminished reading, writing, and speaking skills is vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>, published in 1949, is a demoralizing post-World War II vision of global totalitarianism. It is set in London\u2014the British Isles are now part of a superstate called Oceania, which also includes the Americas. Oceania is always at war with either of the world\u2019s other two superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia.<\/p>\n In Oceania, \u201cthe Party,\u201d a cadre of megalomaniacal despots, wields absolute power. This regime has destroyed society as we know it, setting children against parents and wives against husbands, enforcing unwavering loyalty to \u201cBig Brother,\u201d the potentate whose Stalin-like countenance stares out balefully from posters no one can avoid.<\/p>\n One of the Party\u2019s acknowledged goals is the end of independent thought, which it hopes to bring about by instituting one of its pet projects: a language called \u201cNewspeak.\u201d Orwell worked Newspeak out in exhaustive detail and added an appendix at the end of 1984<\/em> titled \u201cThe Principles of Newspeak.\u201d The brief essay describes how the Party dumbed down standard English, or \u201cOldspeak,\u201d and mangled and perverted it into a streamlined, regimented version of English in which complexity and nuance were impossible.<\/p>\n Newspeak was designed to make a heretical thought \u201cliterally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.\u201d The Party abolished all but the most mundane, unequivocal, easy-to-say words. Its aim was to render speech \u201cas nearly as possible independent of consciousness\u201d so that communication might become \u201ca gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous,\u201d allowing speakers to \u201cspray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.\u201d And \u201cthe texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness \u2026 assisted the process still further.\u201d<\/p>\n Newspeak encapsulates Orwell\u2019s loathing for systems that manipulate language to cover their tracks as they consolidate their power. Newspeak is English disfigured to do its masters\u2019 bidding. It\u2019s so radical that in 1984<\/em> the Party is implementing it in stages, targeting the year 2050 for the transition to be complete. When Newspeak takes over, anything imaginative or unconventional, let alone remotely subversive, will be impossible to convey in words.<\/p>\n The main character in 1984<\/em> is a hapless everyman named Winston Smith. He works in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is rewriting history, expunging recorded facts that the Party finds inconvenient. One day, Winston receives an assignment (always in Newspeak): \u201ctimes 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.<\/strong>\u201d Orwell translates: \u201cThe reporting for Big Brother\u2019s Order for the Day in the Times<\/em> of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.\u201d<\/p>\n Note Newspeak\u2019s militant minimalism: the telescoping of \u201cOrder for the Day\u201d into \u201cdayorder,\u201d plus \u201cbb,\u201d \u201crefs,\u201d \u201cunpersons,\u201d \u201cupsub\u201d and \u201cantefiling.\u201d \u201cFullwise\u201d replaces \u201cin full\u201d because all Newspeak adverbs end in wise<\/em>. \u201cDoubleplusungood,\u201d for \u201cextremely unsatisfactory,\u201d is one of the new tongue\u2019s inspired achievements in sheer hideousness. Because Newspeak is shrinking the vocabulary, it uses \u201cungood\u201d to replace bad<\/em>, awful<\/em>, wrong<\/em>, etc. As for \u201cplus\u201d and \u201cdoubleplus,\u201d they\u2019re the only words available in Newspeak for adding emphasis.<\/p>\n The passage in the Declaration of Independence that starts, \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident,\u201d with its references to equality, liberty, and happiness, is literally impossible to translate into Newspeak. \u201cThe nearest one could come to doing so,\u201d Orwell wrote, \u201cwould be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s not just professors and snobs who deplore the decline of English. The great essayist and novelist George Orwell (1903-50) had much to say about the corruption of language\u2014and how it enables tyranny. The warning was clear: a distracted populace with diminished reading, writing, and speaking skills is vulnerable. Orwell\u2019s 1984, published in 1949, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,24,10,12,48,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbreviations","category-adjectives-adverbs","category-definitions","category-effective-writing","category-prefixes-and-suffixes","category-vocabulary"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}