Newspeak

[David Morris]

http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns_frames.html

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the
ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was
not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either
in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but
this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It
was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard
English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained
ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and
grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version
in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary,
was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that
we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all
other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that
is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally
unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary
was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every
meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all
other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating
undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings,
and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.



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