To Kill a Word: Orwellian Linguistics
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"Words have in this imperfect world lives of their own," writes historian Crane Brinton, "and to kill a word is at least to acquire some kind of trophy." Humans do in fact seem to have an instinctive understanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that any concept that can't be expressed in language, can't be thought, either. Rare is the revolution that doesn't attempt to sandbag natural language to prevent its subjects from thinking counter-revolutionary thoughts, as the recent invention of Croatian attests. Their activities seldom contribute anything of value to the quest for communication.
Newspeak is an old idea
George Orwell is universally associated with this pernicious phenomenon. A Communist who violently opposed totalitarianism regardless of sponsor, Orwell savaged Soviet Communism for selling out the Revolution. In 1984, published in 1949, Orwell's speculative "English Socialist Party" invents Newspeak, an impoverished dialect of English, solely to prevent people from expressing, and therefore thinking, thoughts that contradict the official line. Thus Orwell mocked the politically correct speech that Stalin forced on the Soviet people. (The term "politically correct" actually originated in Soviet Russia)
The goal of Newspeak, as an exhaustive appendix to 1984 explains, is to suppress precision in favour of awkward, fuzzy neologisms. The Party accomplishes this by cutting vocabulary and forcing a relative, agglomerative structure on English. Note the dampening effect that such tinkering has on protest:
Oldspeak: "It's too warm in here."
Newspeak: "It's too uncold in here."
Logs and splinters
Orwell had an extraordinary talent for identifying essential truths and describing them in such a way as to make them undeniable. (Sadly, his works have not stopped dictators large and small from denying them all the same.) He remains one of the world's most popular writers, inspiring pages of online commentary in many languages, as well as online chats, and at least one provocative e-zine. Most online Orwell quoters are rightwingers, probably due to confusion over Orwell's own politics; though he actively opposed Communist dictatorship, in no sense was Orwell right wing. It's ironic to see his name invoked in foamy rants against "socialist One World Order." Given that the only global conspiracy left today is multinational corporate capitalism, it's likely that Orwell would be skewering that, were he alive today, rather than fantasy Communists. Nor have leftwing commentators failed to cite right wing use of Orwellian non-language in their criticism.
