Newspeak

You know the situation. You’re sitting around chatting with friends about the new closed-circuit TV cameras going up in the high street and it’s not long before one of them will say “It’s just like Orwell, 1984 – Big Brother is watching you”. OK, that person is usually me – I’m a real barrel of laughs at parties. The point of this post is not to discuss the rights and wrongs, but to have a quick peek at the main method for controlling minds used by the authorities in the novel 1984. Any similarity to existing persons or events is purely intentional.

The Newspeak language was designed to be simple, spartan and to require the use of as few words as possible. The idea was that if the language – and the ability to express ideas – was suppressed and controlled, the populace could not organise resistance and would not be able to communicate “undesirable” ideas (known in Newspeak as “thoughtcrime”) easily. One of the characters in the book – Syme – explains it: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.

The structure of Newspeak was designed to be simple. Words considered to be redundant were removed from Oldspeak (the English language). The word “good” is probably the most famous example. The antonym “bad” was considered superfluous and was replaced by “ungood”, simply replacing bad with good plus a negative prefix. Words were modified in different way, too. Following the good example, intensifiers and superlatives could be added, providing – in ascending order: good, gooder and goodest as well as plusgood and doubleplusgood. Easy, no? Well, maybe not so easy, but if you take it in the context of learning French, they already use a similar modifier: plus. So, in French: big is grand (I am using a masculine example, before you linguists start shouting at me!), bigger is plus grand (more big) and much bigger is beaucoup plus grand (much more big). For a full explanation from Mr Orwell himself, read the appendix to 1984, handily available on this very Internet for your convenience.

So, do we live in an Orwellian nightmare of Newspeak or not? Judge for yourself but remember the following words and phrases used to euphemize various unpleasant, criminal or nefarious acts:

Extraordinary Rendition: The transferring of political prisoners by air from a place where torture is illegal (say, a US air base in Europe) to a place where it is practically a national sport (say, Rwanda). The originating country can then say they were not involved in torture (America, for example).

Correctional Facility: Prison. The low number of inmates who leave “corrected” makes it something of a misnomer.

Collateral Damage: The stupid civilians who are foolish enough to get in the way when people are trying to have a good war. Sounds slightly better than victims or corpses.

Ordnance Delivery: Bombing people.

HRP: A Human Remains Pouch. A body bag to you and me.

Voluntary Labour Force: Slaves.

I’m sure there are a round a million others (you are welcome submit your favourites), but you get the idea. I’m a person who likes to call a spade a person-motivated earth mobility facilitation unit and I am not at all happy with the way things are going. Newspeak? Doubleplusungood.