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What Orwell was doing with Newspeak was, I believe, less a direct spoof of existing schemes than an illustration of how common habits of language might be consc
by jasomill 6y ago
What Orwell was doing with Newspeak was, I believe, less a direct spoof of existing schemes than an illustration of how common habits of language might be consciously harnessed and directed by a totalitarian regime to further its own intellectual and political designs. In his own words[1],
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Along these lines, the basic idea behind Newspeak was to create a language where "the existing dialect" would "do the job for" the Party, by making the expression of desirable thoughts not merely the natural result of lazily-chosen expression, but the automatic result of any admissible expression, by simplifying, not only the language itself, but the underlying body of ideas it was capable of expressing.
[1] https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit