George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works

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George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Official Language of His Totalitarian Dystopia in 1984 • It’s easy to hear “Newspeak,” the “official language of Oceania,” as “news speak.” This is perfectly reasonable, but it gives us the impression that it relates strictly to its appearance in mass media. Orwell obviously intended the ambiguity---it is the language of official propaganda after all---but the portmanteau actually comes from the words “new speak”—and it has been created to supersede “Oldspeak,” Orwell writes, “or Standard English, as we should call it.” • The citizen of Oceania, Orwell tells us, must have an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'.... His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). The latter included only intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of he woman: all else was sexcrime. • The C class of words may be the most insidious of all. While it “consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms” that “resembled the scientific terms in use today,” the Party took care “to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings.” For example, • There was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science,’ any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc. • Orwell then goes on to discuss the difficulty of translating the work of the past into Newspeak. He uses as an example the Declaration of Independence: “All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in that it expressed a palpable untruth---i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength.” As for the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s rousing preamble, “it would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak,” writes Orwell. “The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink.” • https://labourheartlands.com/

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