Crimestop

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The mental habit of instantly rejecting any thought that could be dangerous or heretical, without letting it reach conscious reasoning
2. The unthinking capacity to shut out inconvenient or subversive ideas before they can be examined, as invented by George Orwell in 1984
3. Willful blindness that protects a person from forbidden truths by refusing to think certain thoughts at all, a concept from Orwell's dystopian fiction

Etymology: Crimestop is a coinage from George Orwell's 1949 novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where it names the mental habit of stopping one's own thought before it reaches a dangerous conclusion. Orwell built it from "crime" and "stop," on the model of "thoughtcrime," and the book's Newspeak vocabulary treats it as a protective reflex: the Party wants citizens who never notice that a line of reasoning leads somewhere forbidden. Orwell's own gloss, given in the novel's appendix on Newspeak, explains the word as the faculty of stopping short, "as in a sensation of being pushed back," whenever a dangerous train of thought begins. The word is therefore not a traditional term at all but an invention whose meaning is spelled out by its parts: a crime committed in the mind, and the stopping that prevents it.