Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Newspeak shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Newspeak offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Newspeak at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Newspeak? Wrong! If the Newspeak is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Newspeak then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Newspeak? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Newspeak and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Newspeak wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Newspeak then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Newspeak site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Newspeak, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Newspeak, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
Newspeak is a
fictional language in George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an Appendix (in the past tense)Orwell, George (1949).
Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak", pp. 309–323. New York: Plume, 2003.
Pynchon, Thomas (2003). "Foreword to the Centennial Edition" to
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. vii–xxvi . New York: Plume, 2003.
Fromm, Erich (1961). "Afterword" to
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 324–337. New York: Plume, 2003.
Orwell's text has a "Selected Bibliography", pp. 338–9; the foreword and the afterword each contain further references.
Copyright is
explicitly extended to digital and any other means.
Plume edition is a reprint of a hardcover by Harcourt. Plume edition is also in a Signet edition., in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on
English language but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar (e.g., 'good' means 'to love Big Brother'; 'bad' is deleted from the language because 'ungood' means 'bad'; therefore there is now no literal concept to express the term, 'Big Brother is bad'). This suited the totalitarianism regime of the Party, whose aim was to make any alternative thinking ("thoughtcrime") or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
The Newspeak term for the English language is
Oldspeak. Oldspeak was intended to have been completely eclipsed by Newspeak before
2050.
The genesis of Newspeak can be found in the constructed language Basic English, which Orwell promoted from 1942 to 1944 before emphatically rejecting it in his essay, "Politics and the English Language". In this paper he laments the quality of the English of his day, citing examples of dying metaphors, pretentious diction or
rhetoric, and meaningless words — all of which contribute to fuzzy ideas and a lack of logical thinking. Towards the end of this essay, having argued his case, Orwell muses:
Thus forcing the use of Newspeak, according to Orwell, describes a deliberate intent to exploit this degeneration with the aim of oppressing its speakers.
Basic principles of Newspeak
To remove
synonyms &
antonyms
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of Meaning (linguistic) from language, leaving simple
dichotomy (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good thoughts and thoughtcrimes) which reinforce the total dominance of the State. Similarly, Newspeak root words served as both nouns and verbs, which allowed further reduction in the total number of words; for example, "think" served as both noun and verb, so the word "thought" was not required and could be abolished. A staccato rhythm of short syllables was also a goal, further reducing the need for deep thinking about language. (See List of Newspeak words#Duckspeak.) Successful Newspeak meant that there would be fewer and fewer words -- dictionaries would get thinner and thinner.
In addition, words with opposite meanings were removed as redundant, so "bad" became "ungood." Words with comparative and superlative meanings were also simplified, so "better" became "gooder", and "best" likewise became "goodest". Intensifiers could be added, so "great" became "plusgood", and "excellent" or "splendid" likewise became "doubleplusgood." Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix "-ful" to a root word (e.g. "goodthinkful", orthodox in thought), and adverbs by adding "-wise" ("goodthinkwise", in an orthodox manner). In this manner, as many words as possible were removed from the language. The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even the dichotomies to a single word that was a
Yes man of some sort: an obedient word with which everyone answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.
Some of the constructions in Newspeak which Orwell derides, such as replacing "bad" with "ungood", are in fact characteristic of
agglutinative languages, although foreign to
English language. It is also possible that Orwell modeled aspects of Newspeak on
Esperanto; for example "ungood" is constructed similarly to the Esperanto word "malbona". Orwell had been exposed to Esperanto in
1927 when living in
Paris with his aunt Kate Limouzin and her husband
Eugène Lanti, a prominent Esperantist. Esperanto was the language of the house, and Orwell was disadvantaged by not speaking it, which may account for some antipathy towards the language. It can also be observed that some strongly hierarchical groups use these kinds of constructions liberally. For example, the Swedish Military jargon substitutes "unpeace" (Swedish:
ofred) for "war", and "ungood" (Swedish:
obra) for "bad".
To control thought
The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought. One question raised in response to this is whether we are defined by our language, or whether we actively define it. For instance, how can we communicate the need for
Freedom (political), or organize an uprising, if we do not have the words for either? This is related to the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein's proposition, "The limits of my language mean the limits to my world." However, this view is disputed by authors like Gene Wolfe (see the article on his Ascian language).
Examples of Newspeak, from the novel, include: "
crimethink"; "doubleplusungood"; and "Ingsoc." They mean, respectively: "thought-crime"; "extremely bad"; and "English Socialism," the official political philosophy of the Party. The word "Newspeak" itself also comes from the language. Note that all of these words would be obsolete and should be removed in the "final" version of Newspeak, except for "doubleplusungood" in certain contexts.
Generically, Newspeak has come to mean any attempt to restrict disapproved language by a government or other powerful entity.
Real-life examples of Newspeak
A comparison to Newspeak may arguably be seen in polarised and simplified political and journalistic rhetoric, where the arguments of either side ultimately reduce to "four legs good, two legs bad", in Orwellian terminology (see Animal Farm). A correlated phenomenon is the dumbing down of political discourse, seen in the employment of
soundbites for the benefit of, or by, the media.
Historical and pre-Historical change of the meaning of words
Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking about the morality of winner in his work Genealogy of Morals, cites some examples of words in some languages which have probably undergone a change in their meaning following a victory of a people over another. For instance, the
Latin word
malus which means both
bad and
dark haired may take its origin to a previous
Celts invasion of Italy, by which the victorious Celts who had fairer hair than Italian population used to associate the losers with the idea of badness. The English word
good looks like
god, while in German language Nietzsche observes that
schlicht (simple) is very close to
schlecht (bad). That is, some words were coined by the victorious populations to add connotations to other words or concepts.
"Politically correct" euphemisms
Charges of Newspeak are sometimes advanced when a group tries to replace a word/phrase that is politically unsuitable (e.g. "civilian casualties") or offensive (e.g. "murder") with an alternative, inoffensive euphemism (e.g. "
collateral damage"), or falsely innocuous (as in "liquidate the
kulaks" or "resettle the Jews", as used by the Soviets or the Nazis, respectively, to conceal their
democides).
Some people maintain that to make certain words or phrases "unspeakable" (thoughtcrime) through the attempt to make language politically correct restricts what ideas may be held (Newspeak) and is therefore tantamount to censorship. Others believe that expunging terms that have fallen out of favor or become insulting will make people less likely to hold "outdated" or offensive views.
Either way, there is a resemblance between censorship due to moral dogmatisms and Newspeak, although some may feel that they differ in their intentions: in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is instituted to enhance the power of the state over the individual; politically correct language, on the other hand, is said by supporters to free individuals from stereotypical preconceptions caused by the use of prejudicial terminology. It is this attempt to change thought through changing (or eliminating) words that earns political correctness the connection to Newspeak.
For many, there exist striking instances where Orwell's speculations have matched with reality. Orwell suggested that all philosophies prior to Ingsoc (English Socialism) would be covered under the term "oldthink", bearing with it none of the nuances of these ideologies, but simply a connotation of badness. It is argued that since the end of the Second World War and the
Cold War, a similar effect has been wrought on the words "
fascism" and "communism"; that communism no longer bears with it the doctrines of
Marx, Friedrich Engels, or
Lenin, but rather a general bad connotation. Likewise, they contend that few people are aware of the differences between the theories of government of
Benito Mussolini, Engelbert Dollfuss, Francisco Franco, and Adolf Hitler; all are placed under the blanket term "fascism" or "
Nazism" with only a general denotation of badness. An example of this is the rise term "islamofascism"" to describe the ideology of al-Qaeda-type Muslim groups, despite the fact this organization is not, in fact, fascist.
In the Spanish Civil War, both parties called each other by
dysphemism names. Perhaps the best description is
it began as a conflict of Second Spanish Republic and Nationalists, and ended up as a war of Communists and Fascists.Political groups often use neologisms to frame their views positively and to discredit their opponents' views. One of the most prominent and heated examples is the U.S. abortion debates: Those advocating restrictions on abortion label themselves "pro-life", seeing the term "abortion" or the idea of "aborting a pregnancy" as euphemistic for "murder of an unborn child" and leaving their opponents, who do not view the
human organism as being its own
legal person in fetus, and who see the issue as being not about life or
death but primarily about women's rights, presumably "anti-life" or "pro-death". Using a similar tactic, those advocating abortions reduce this highly charged and highly complex
morality and
ethics controversy in their own way to a convenient sound byte that redirects emphasis to their own concerns by labeling themselves "pro-choice", leaving their opponents, many of whom are women themselves, and who see women's rights as completely unrelated to what is for them a life and death matter, supposedly "anti-women" and "anti-choice". Members of either side are commonly heard expressing views that the other camp's self-label is lie, or at the very least overly simplistic.
In modern business, it is often frowned upon to use words with a negative connotation, such as "problem" and instead problems are referred to as "challenges", "obstacles", or even "opportunities".
Three examples unrelated to
political correctness are
Basic English, a language which takes pride in reducing the number of English words,
World English and
E-Prime, another simplified version of English.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Another common use of Newspeak today is the overuse of
abbreviations. To quote from the
1984 Appendix "It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it." Attention is also drawn to the use of such abbreviations by totalitarian regimes prior to World War II (see Gestapo,
Comintern, Agitprop, Minculpop).
Even more powerful are acronyms like "USA PATRIOT", "
Ofcom", "
OPEC","NAMbLA", "PETA", "
NAFTA", "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence", and the "
PROTECT Act" which can be pronounced as if they were proper words. This is most vividly seen in acronyms like "
laser", "Scuba set", and "
radar", which are in widespread use today and are nearly always written in lowercase.
On July 5
1959 President Sukarno of
Indonesia abolished parliamentary democracy and established a system of government-by-decree called
Manifesto Politik or in short
Manipol - an abbreviation greatly reminiscent of those in Orwell's book, though there is no evidence that Sukarno read the book or was directly influenced by it. In a similar way, the Indonesian term "Tapol" (political prisoner) - first used as a derogatory word by the authorities, later adopted as a term of pride by the "tapols" themselves - was created from the first syllables of "prisoner" and "political".
See also
References
Further reading
NB: Cf.
Nineteen Eighty-Four#External links.
- "1984-Appendix". Retrieved on 21 April 2006. The complete Newspeak appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four (NB: Copyright).
- "Newspeak Dictionary". Updated 16 April 2006. Retrieved 21 April 2006. ("The Newspeak Dictionary has moved." New URL shown.)
- Burgess, Anthony. Nineteen Eighty-Five. Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1978. ISBN 0-316-11651-3. Anthony Burgess discusses the plausibility of Newspeak.
- Green, Jonathon. Newspeak: a dictionary of jargon. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 1984. ISBN 0-7102-0673-9.
- "Find in a library: Newspeak: A dictionary of Jargon", by Jonathon Green. Retrieved 21 April 2006.
- Victor Klemperer. LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen.. Original German language editions.
- Victor Klemperer & Watt, Roderick H. LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7734-8681-X. An annotated edition of Victor Klemperer’s LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen with English notes and commentary by Roderick H. Watt.
- Victor Klemperer & Brady, Martin (tr.). The language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. London, UK; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000. ISBN 0-485-11526-3 (alk. paper). Translated by Martin Brady.
- Young, John Wesley . Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. ISBN 0-8139-1324-1. John Wesley Young wrote this scholarly work about Newspeak and historical examples of language control.
- An independent completion of the Newspeak language
Newspeak is a
fictional language in
George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an Appendix (in the past tense)Orwell, George (1949).
Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak", pp. 309–323. New York: Plume, 2003.
Pynchon, Thomas (2003). "Foreword to the Centennial Edition" to
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. vii–xxvi . New York: Plume, 2003.
Fromm, Erich (1961). "Afterword" to
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 324–337. New York: Plume, 2003.
Orwell's text has a "Selected Bibliography", pp. 338–9; the foreword and the afterword each contain further references.
Copyright is
explicitly extended to digital and any other means.
Plume edition is a reprint of a hardcover by Harcourt. Plume edition is also in a Signet edition., in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English language but has a greatly reduced and simplified
vocabulary and
grammar (e.g., 'good' means 'to love Big Brother'; 'bad' is deleted from the language because 'ungood' means 'bad'; therefore there is now no literal concept to express the term, 'Big Brother is bad'). This suited the totalitarianism regime of the Party, whose aim was to make any alternative thinking ("
thoughtcrime") or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
The Newspeak term for the
English language is
Oldspeak. Oldspeak was intended to have been completely eclipsed by Newspeak before 2050.
The genesis of Newspeak can be found in the
constructed language Basic English, which Orwell promoted from 1942 to 1944 before emphatically rejecting it in his essay, "
Politics and the English Language". In this paper he laments the quality of the English of his day, citing examples of dying metaphors, pretentious diction or
rhetoric, and meaningless words — all of which contribute to fuzzy ideas and a lack of
logical thinking. Towards the end of this essay, having argued his case, Orwell muses:
Thus forcing the use of Newspeak, according to Orwell, describes a deliberate intent to exploit this degeneration with the aim of oppressing its speakers.
Basic principles of Newspeak
To remove
synonyms & antonyms
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of
Meaning (linguistic) from language, leaving simple dichotomy (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good thoughts and thoughtcrimes) which reinforce the total dominance of the State. Similarly, Newspeak root words served as both nouns and verbs, which allowed further reduction in the total number of words; for example, "think" served as both noun and verb, so the word "thought" was not required and could be abolished. A
staccato rhythm of short syllables was also a goal, further reducing the need for deep thinking about language. (See List of Newspeak words#Duckspeak.) Successful Newspeak meant that there would be fewer and fewer words -- dictionaries would get thinner and thinner.
In addition, words with opposite meanings were removed as redundant, so "bad" became "ungood." Words with comparative and superlative meanings were also simplified, so "better" became "gooder", and "best" likewise became "goodest". Intensifiers could be added, so "great" became "plusgood", and "excellent" or "splendid" likewise became "doubleplusgood." Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix "-ful" to a root word (e.g. "goodthinkful", orthodox in thought), and adverbs by adding "-wise" ("goodthinkwise", in an orthodox manner). In this manner, as many words as possible were removed from the language. The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even the dichotomies to a single word that was a Yes man of some sort: an obedient word with which everyone answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.
Some of the constructions in Newspeak which Orwell derides, such as replacing "bad" with "ungood", are in fact characteristic of agglutinative languages, although foreign to English language. It is also possible that Orwell modeled aspects of Newspeak on Esperanto; for example "ungood" is constructed similarly to the Esperanto word "malbona". Orwell had been exposed to Esperanto in
1927 when living in Paris with his aunt
Kate Limouzin and her husband Eugène Lanti, a prominent Esperantist. Esperanto was the language of the house, and Orwell was disadvantaged by not speaking it, which may account for some antipathy towards the language. It can also be observed that some strongly hierarchical groups use these kinds of constructions liberally. For example, the Swedish Military jargon substitutes "unpeace" (Swedish:
ofred) for "war", and "ungood" (Swedish:
obra) for "bad".
To control thought
The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought. One question raised in response to this is whether we are defined by our language, or whether we actively define it. For instance, how can we communicate the need for Freedom (political), or organize an
uprising, if we do not have the words for either? This is related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein's proposition, "The limits of my language mean the limits to my world." However, this view is disputed by authors like
Gene Wolfe (see the article on his
Ascian language).
Examples of Newspeak, from the novel, include: "
crimethink"; "doubleplusungood"; and "Ingsoc." They mean, respectively: "thought-crime"; "extremely bad"; and "English Socialism," the official political philosophy of the Party. The word "Newspeak" itself also comes from the language. Note that all of these words would be obsolete and should be removed in the "final" version of Newspeak, except for "doubleplusungood" in certain contexts.
Generically, Newspeak has come to mean any attempt to restrict disapproved language by a government or other powerful entity.
Real-life examples of Newspeak
A comparison to Newspeak may arguably be seen in polarised and simplified political and journalistic rhetoric, where the arguments of either side ultimately reduce to "four legs good, two legs bad", in Orwellian terminology (see Animal Farm). A correlated phenomenon is the dumbing down of political discourse, seen in the employment of soundbites for the benefit of, or by, the media.
Historical and pre-Historical change of the meaning of words
Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking about the morality of winner in his work Genealogy of Morals, cites some examples of words in some languages which have probably undergone a change in their meaning following a victory of a people over another. For instance, the Latin word
malus which means both
bad and
dark haired may take its origin to a previous
Celts invasion of
Italy, by which the victorious Celts who had fairer hair than Italian population used to associate the losers with the idea of badness. The English word
good looks like
god, while in
German language Nietzsche observes that
schlicht (simple) is very close to
schlecht (bad). That is, some words were coined by the victorious populations to add connotations to other words or concepts.
"Politically correct" euphemisms
Charges of Newspeak are sometimes advanced when a group tries to replace a word/phrase that is politically unsuitable (e.g. "civilian casualties") or offensive (e.g. "murder") with an alternative, inoffensive euphemism (e.g. "
collateral damage"), or falsely innocuous (as in "liquidate the
kulaks" or "resettle the Jews", as used by the
Soviets or the
Nazis, respectively, to conceal their
democides).
Some people maintain that to make certain words or phrases "unspeakable" (thoughtcrime) through the attempt to make language politically correct restricts what ideas may be held (Newspeak) and is therefore tantamount to censorship. Others believe that expunging terms that have fallen out of favor or become insulting will make people less likely to hold "outdated" or offensive views.
Either way, there is a resemblance between censorship due to moral dogmatisms and Newspeak, although some may feel that they differ in their intentions: in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is instituted to enhance the power of the state over the individual; politically correct language, on the other hand, is said by supporters to free individuals from stereotypical preconceptions caused by the use of prejudicial terminology. It is this attempt to change thought through changing (or eliminating) words that earns political correctness the connection to Newspeak.
For many, there exist striking instances where Orwell's speculations have matched with reality. Orwell suggested that all philosophies prior to Ingsoc (English Socialism) would be covered under the term "oldthink", bearing with it none of the nuances of these ideologies, but simply a connotation of badness. It is argued that since the end of the Second World War and the Cold War, a similar effect has been wrought on the words "
fascism" and "
communism"; that communism no longer bears with it the doctrines of Marx, Friedrich Engels, or Lenin, but rather a general bad connotation. Likewise, they contend that few people are aware of the differences between the theories of government of
Benito Mussolini, Engelbert Dollfuss, Francisco Franco, and
Adolf Hitler; all are placed under the blanket term "fascism" or "
Nazism" with only a general denotation of badness. An example of this is the rise term "islamofascism"" to describe the ideology of al-Qaeda-type Muslim groups, despite the fact this organization is not, in fact, fascist.
In the Spanish Civil War, both parties called each other by
dysphemism names. Perhaps the best description is
it began as a conflict of Second Spanish Republic and Nationalists, and ended up as a war of Communists and Fascists.Political groups often use neologisms to frame their views positively and to discredit their opponents' views. One of the most prominent and heated examples is the U.S.
abortion debates: Those advocating restrictions on abortion label themselves "pro-life", seeing the term "abortion" or the idea of "aborting a pregnancy" as euphemistic for "murder of an unborn child" and leaving their opponents, who do not view the human
organism as being its own
legal person in fetus, and who see the issue as being not about life or death but primarily about women's rights, presumably "anti-life" or "pro-death". Using a similar tactic, those advocating abortions reduce this highly charged and highly complex morality and
ethics controversy in their own way to a convenient sound byte that redirects emphasis to their own concerns by labeling themselves "
pro-choice", leaving their opponents, many of whom are women themselves, and who see women's rights as completely unrelated to what is for them a life and death matter, supposedly "anti-women" and "anti-choice". Members of either side are commonly heard expressing views that the other camp's self-label is lie, or at the very least overly simplistic.
In modern business, it is often frowned upon to use words with a negative connotation, such as "problem" and instead problems are referred to as "challenges", "obstacles", or even "opportunities".
Three examples unrelated to
political correctness are
Basic English, a language which takes pride in reducing the number of English words, World English and
E-Prime, another simplified version of English.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Another common use of Newspeak today is the overuse of
abbreviations. To quote from the
1984 Appendix "It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it." Attention is also drawn to the use of such abbreviations by
totalitarian regimes prior to World War II (see
Gestapo,
Comintern,
Agitprop, Minculpop).
Even more powerful are acronyms like "
USA PATRIOT", "Ofcom", "OPEC","NAMbLA", "
PETA", "NAFTA", "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence", and the "
PROTECT Act" which can be pronounced as if they were proper words. This is most vividly seen in acronyms like "laser", "
Scuba set", and "
radar", which are in widespread use today and are nearly always written in lowercase.
On July 5 1959 President Sukarno of
Indonesia abolished parliamentary democracy and established a system of government-by-decree called
Manifesto Politik or in short
Manipol - an abbreviation greatly reminiscent of those in Orwell's book, though there is no evidence that Sukarno read the book or was directly influenced by it. In a similar way, the Indonesian term "Tapol" (political prisoner) - first used as a derogatory word by the authorities, later adopted as a term of pride by the "tapols" themselves - was created from the first syllables of "prisoner" and "political".
See also
References
Further reading
NB: Cf.
Nineteen Eighty-Four#External links.
- "1984-Appendix". Retrieved on 21 April 2006. The complete Newspeak appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four (NB: Copyright).
- "Newspeak Dictionary". Updated 16 April 2006. Retrieved 21 April 2006. ("The Newspeak Dictionary has moved." New URL shown.)
- Burgess, Anthony. Nineteen Eighty-Five. Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1978. ISBN 0-316-11651-3. Anthony Burgess discusses the plausibility of Newspeak.
- Green, Jonathon. Newspeak: a dictionary of jargon. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 1984. ISBN 0-7102-0673-9.
- "Find in a library: Newspeak: A dictionary of Jargon", by Jonathon Green. Retrieved 21 April 2006.
- Victor Klemperer. LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen.. Original German language editions.
- Victor Klemperer & Watt, Roderick H. LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7734-8681-X. An annotated edition of Victor Klemperer’s LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen with English notes and commentary by Roderick H. Watt.
- Victor Klemperer & Brady, Martin (tr.). The language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. London, UK; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000. ISBN 0-485-11526-3 (alk. paper). Translated by Martin Brady.
- Young, John Wesley . Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. ISBN 0-8139-1324-1. John Wesley Young wrote this scholarly work about Newspeak and historical examples of language control.
- An independent completion of the Newspeak language
Newspeak
I have. I don’t know, but I suspect it’s like this. import random def main(argv): if len(argv) < 2: sys.exit(1) f = file(argv[0]).read().splitlines ...
Newspeak › Login
Newspeak
Newspeak from FOLDOC
Newspeak. A language inspired by Scratchpad. [J.K. Foderaro. "The Design of a Language for Algebraic Computation", Ph.D. Thesis, UC Berkeley, 1983].
Newspeak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets ...
List of Newspeak words - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional language Newspeak attempts to influence thought by influencing the expressiveness of the English language.
SourceForge.net: Newspeak
The world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications ... A Cocoa IRC client for Mac OS X. Some of your favorite features may even be ...
The 2008 Lexicon A guide to contemporary Newspeak
The aim of the Centre for Policy Studies is to develop and promote policies that provide freedom and encouragement for individuals to pursue the aspirations they have for ...
newspeak.co.uk
newspeak definition of newspeak in the Free Online Encyclopedia.
This is evidently Orwellian Newspeak, since some of the requirements for an alien to have his status "adjusted" include provisions that allow the legalization of most every illegal ...
American Newspeak
Commentary on current events and political statements.