Newspeak

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈn(j)uːspiːk/

Definitions

1. Language deliberately constructed to restrict thought and manipulate meaning by eliminating words, altering definitions, and reducing vocabulary to prevent certain ideas from being expressible
2. Language designed to control thought by systematically limiting vocabulary, redefining words, and obscuring meaning to make dangerous ideas inexpressible
3. A system of communication intentionally constructed to constrain thinking by reducing vocabulary, distorting definitions, and suppressing the ability to articulate dissenting or forbidden concepts

Etymology: In the world George Orwell imagined, the word "free" survives, but only in sentences like "This dog is free from lice." Political freedom has no name, and an idea without a name, the theory goes, cannot be thought. That is the purpose of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. The novel coined the word. Its construction is deliberately plain: new plus speak, with "speak" in the old sense of speech or talk. That flatness is the joke. A language built to empty out meaning gets a name that sounds like a committee memo, and the ordinary English it is replacing becomes, in the same style, "Oldspeak." Orwell worked out his invented tongue in unusual detail, in an appendix titled "The Principles of Newspeak." It is founded on English but designed to drift further from it every year, with a target of fully replacing standard English by about 2050. There are three vocabularies: A for everyday life, B for politically loaded compounds such as "thoughtcrime," "doublethink" and "Ingsoc," and C for technical terms. Root words serve as both noun and verb, so "think" covers "thought" too. Prefixes replace whole families of words: "ungood" makes "bad" unnecessary, and "doubleplusgood" handles "excellent." In the novel a philologist named Syme, at work on the Eleventh Edition of the official dictionary, explains the project with pride: "We're destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day." The stated aim is to make heretical thought "literally unthinkable." Orwell was not inventing from nothing. In the appendix he points to the clipped abbreviations that political language had grown fond of earlier in the century, such as "Nazi," "Gestapo," "Comintern" and "Agitprop." He argues that shrinking a phrase like "Communist International" into one brisk word quietly strips away its associations. He had made a related case in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language." There was also a closer model. In the early 1940s, while working at the BBC, Orwell took a real interest in Basic English, C. K. Ogden's scheme for doing everything in English with a vocabulary of 850 words. Its tidy, limited design fed into the darker idea of a language engineered to make some thoughts impossible to say. Many readers have spotted a quiet twist. The appendix is written in standard, unhurried English and refers to the language in the past tense, as something studied from a later age. That suggests the Party's project never fully succeeded. The word did. Once out of the novel it lost its capital letter and came to mean any propaganda or evasive official language, the kind that renames a retreat a "strategic realignment." Its second half even broke loose as a suffix of its own, which is why English now has "adspeak," "corporatespeak" and "techspeak." Each one carries a small echo of Orwell's warning.

Synonyms: doublespeak, gobbledygook, jargon