Member-only story
Content vs Intent.
In almost every discussion about the use of language, George Orwell’s 1984 rears its head. So I’d like to begin by apologising for my lack of originality. I just want to quote one passage, I’ll get it out of my system, and we can all move on. Ok?
I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in “The Times” occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. 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. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
Of course, we all know that Newspeak is bad and that Syme is the bad guy, but let’s think about this for a second. What is it about the world that he’s describing that we find worrying? A world where it becomes impossible to…