I would like to take this opportunity to rail against this Syme fellow. "In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words."
He's killing me, Smalls.
But seriously, I thought this Newspeak business was going to be a trippy little vernacular that I would bring into my own everyday language. I was going to start saying stuff was doubleplusungood, right and left. Now, I'm engaging in a senseless boycott of all such phrases, just because I don't like this fictional character and what he's doing to the English language. I bet you think I'm being dramatic for entertainment purposes.
Maybe a little.
In all seriousness, though, I can't see what the point of this Newspeak--
Wait. I remembered what the point is. They're making it impossible to commit "thoughtcrime" by erasing words conducive to discontent. Yeah. "In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." That sounds like my worst nightmare. To feel that things are not quite right but never be able to understand why because of a simple... dialect insufficiency... would drive me insane.
Oh my goodness, how did we both make references to Sandlot? This is madness.
ReplyDeleteAlso, yes, that is in fact the purpose of Newspeak. If you'd like a more in-depth explanation, I'd highly recommend reading the little section in the back of the book about it. It's fairly helpful and mildly interesting.
It miiiight not be in the back of mine, because I bought the crazy Animal Farm/1984 combo edition, and I don't have-- I can check right now. Oh yeah! It's there. Maybe laters.
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