I’m in the middle of Orwell’s 1984 and I haven’t gotten very far, but I have gotten to the descriptions of Newspeak and the dictionaries that they are creating for the new-fangled vocabulary. If you’ve never read 1984, “Newspeak” is the society’s attempt to combine words in order to make them shorter. Sort of a short-hand, if you will. Like I said, I haven’t read much of the book yet, but I will give you an example: “Ingsoc” (English Socialism [not sure why they used an “I” instead of an “E”]) and “dayorder” (order of the day). Clearly, Orwell put much more thought into Newspeak than we do, but if you think about it, we’ve started using Newspeak in a way: J.Lo, LiLo, Bennifer, Brangelina. Granted, these are directed at pop culture icons, but think about the word “ginormous” (gigantic/enormous), which was recently recognized by Webster’s Dictionary as a real word.
In the book, one of the main character’s “comarades” (co-workers) is working on the 11th version of the Newspeak Dictionary. And all Oldspeak (or Standard English) will be phased out by 2050. The comrade tells Winston (the protagonist):
By 2050–earlier, probably–all real knowledge of Old speak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron–they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.
I wonder if this will ever come true. Heaven forbid we mess with literature or try to censor free speech. Again, if you’re unfamiliar, the term “Big Brother” came from this book. We use it everyday to describe “The Man” or the government and that came from this book.
Anyway, I don’t have many more thoughts on this, but feel free to discuss if you feel so inclined.
It always surprises me when a new word has been added to the dictionary. For some reason I have a mindset that all the words in the dictionary are all the words that will ever be. I never thought about losing words, or works of literature due to the “Newspeak” idea. That’s a little frightening.