Happy Birthday George Orwell!
In his honor, post something in Newspeak, or give an example of Newspeak in daily life.
E.g., Clear Skies (for the bill gutting the clean air act), Healthy Forests (for the bill gutting the roadless rule), national interests (to obscure in whose interests various measures are taken), and any number of acronyms that replace real words: FTA, PDA, CCL, WMD, NATO, WTO, UN, DOD, ATF, POTUS, WH, SCOTUS, VP, --when was the last time you thought of the words behind these acronyms as whole words instead of letters?
Excerpt from
"The Principles of Newspeak"
An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.
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.
Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought.
In addition, words with opposite meanings were removed as redundant, so "bad" became "ungood." Words with similar meanings were also removed, so "best" became "doubleplusgood." In this manner, as many words as possible were removed from the language.
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