Newspeak

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Newspeak is a language that appears in George Orwell's 1984. Designed by the ruling Ingsoc regime, its purpose is to suppress thought by severely curtailing both the conceptual vocabulary and permissible grammatical structures of Oldspeak. As Orwell describes in the Appendix: "....a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least insofar as thought is dependent on words." [1]

This idea of totalitarianism taken to its logical extreme is deeply unsettling, not least for its immediate, intuitive plausibility. As with many of the novel's terms and ideas, it captured the popular imagination and has passed into modern political and cultural discourse, to be variously used, abused and confused by individuals right across the political spectrum.

Contents

[edit] Newspeak in practice

Orwell's description of Newspeak is imperfect,[2] but in essence he imagines language distilled to a brute functionality. Basic needs can be expressed, but beyond this, the available vocabulary is so radically compressed as to prohibit anything other than the most perfunctory description or evaluation of any given object, term or concept.

This compression is achieved by breaking down the distinction between the different parts of speech, so that all remaining words can act as both nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs are formed from these noun-verb roots with the addition of -ful and -wise, respectively. Orwell offers the example of the verb to cut, purged as its meaning is sufficiently contained within the new noun-verb knife.[3] By extension, this would lead to the elimination of verbs such as stab, slash, slice, and carve, and knifeful could replace adjectives as diverse as sharp, cutting, pointed, piercing and incisive.

Grammatically, Newspeak is simplified to an almost infantile, pre-literate degree. Irregular verb forms are suppressed (e.g. got, ran, slept = getted, runned, sleeped) and any word can be negated with the prefix un-, (e.g. good : bad = good : ungood, and presumably unknifeful would mean blunt) allowing the further eradication of hundreds of words. Emphasis is added with the modifiers plus- or doubleplus-, hence perhaps the most famous Newspeak formulation: doubleplusungood (meaning "really really bad").[4]

[edit] Examples

[edit] Doublethink

Doublethink describes the act of simultaneously believing in two contradictory concepts. To practice doublethink, a person must "deny the existence of reality" while taking into account "the reality that one denies. . . ."[5] It could be summarized as simultaneously accepting and rejecting a given proposition.

Orwell described doublethink as a "labyrinthine world" where one believes one thing while doing or saying the exact opposite. The very act of practicing doublethink requires a person to employ doublethink - i.e., even though you know doublethink exists, you must deny the existence of doublethink in order to use doublethink. This contradictory concept is at the core of what are now called "Orwellian" social structures.

Fundamentalist Christians believe the whole Bible is literally true. Every time they come across contradictions in the Bible they have to practice doublethink and believe all the contradictions. Doublethink could therefore be thought of as cognitive dissonance that not only remains unresolved but is also desirable to leave unresolved.

[edit] Thoughtcrime/Crimethink

In the novel, the government attempts to control the thoughts of its citizens, as well as their actions. Thoughtcrime is the only type of offence recognised by the Ingsoc government and the punishment is the same regardless of the actual nature of the offence. In his diary, Winston Smith writes that "Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death." The official language of Oceania, newspeak, was developed to effectively make thoughtcrime impossible. The newspeak for thoughtcrime is "Crimethink." Thoughtcrime has become an incredibly influential concept in current political discourse, and the word is often used by those opposing censorship, perceived or otherwise, of a particular viewpoint. It's also frequently invoked as a criticism of hate crime laws, which is a dishonest representation of the intent and content of those laws. After all, the punishment is not for "thinking bad things" but for actually and actively inciting hatred and/or committing violence against others. In the latter case, the hate crime motive is simply seen as an aggravating circumstance meriting harsher punishment of what is already a criminal offence.

[edit] Thought Police

In the novel the Thought Police are agents of the totalitarian government. In the real world the term is used to describe those people who would like to control other people's lives to the extent that the expression of certain thoughts is banned. They would prefer to be able to control the actual thoughts themselves, but not yet being gods, they grudgingly accept that it is still only the expression that they can do anything about. The right-wing equivalent of the political correctness movement, the Thought Police operate in many different realms, but their average concentration rises sharply in the ranks of the religious fundamentalists.

The phrase "Thought Police" may provoke imagery of extreme examples, but anyone can be unreasonably judgmental of other people's thoughts.

[edit] Doublespeak

Doublespeak is a neologism used to describe language that is deliberately intended to conceal meaning; for example: enhanced interrogation interviewing techniques used in a sentence to supplement the word torture. The term is not actually from Orwell's novel, but is instead an extra-canonical portmanteau of "doublethink" and "newspeak." Two common forms of doublespeak are euphemisms and management speak.

[edit] Use and abuse of the term

Newspeak has since become a term for any language that is controlled or abused in the name of political power. Some people have compared some politically correct terminology to Newspeak — this almost universally critical, comparing unfavourably with the totalitarianism expressed in 1984. It may also be argued that internet slang is basically newspeak.

Words that describe prejudice have been compared to Newspeak. In the case of homophobia, for example, a word has been added to describe a new feeling and attitude that specifically demeaned homosexuality unfairly and unjustly. Arguably this trend continued with the addition of heterophobia — although this is really just be a right-wing re-branding of gay rights rather than a new concept. The purpose of Newspeak, however, was to reduce the number of words in the language, thus removing the ability to express new feelings or attitudes (that this probably wouldn't work in reality is not the issue). Adding words is therefore the opposite of Orwell's original Newspeak — it enables new thoughts to be expressed with new words.

A slightly more realistic application of the term to "political correctness" would be when words are banned or discouraged. This is more in line with the original principle of restricting thought by controlling language. Racist terms such as "nigger", or dirty demeaning terms such as "cunt" are removed from the vocabulary in order to combat racism and offensive language.

Another example of creeping Newspeak is the relentless "positive thinking" tendency which has virtually purged the word "problem" from English (and other languages) in favour of the less overtly negative "challenge". This particular style of language is especially prevalent in management and PR circles.

[edit] And finally...

Crimestop is one of Newspeak's less well known concepts, but perhaps the most pertinent (and funny) when discussing the various stripes of fundamentalism. It denotes a learned mental discipline: a conditioned inability even to grasp thoughts contrary to one's own belief system.

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."[6]

[edit] See also

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[edit] Footnotes

  1. p. 312 - 1984, George Orwell, Penguin, 1989
  2. It would have been an immense (and somewhat anal) undertaking to realise his vision completely, and completely unnecessary for the purposes of the novel.
  3. p. 314 - 1984
  4. It is conjectured that, since Orwell had a bad experience with Esperanto in 1927, he gave Newspeak a simplistic grammar and vocabulary as a kind of "take that" against Esperanto's deliberate use of these concepts.
  5. George Orwell, 1984
  6. p. 220-1 - 1984
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