![]() ![]() ![]() These quotations come not from the main text of 1984but from an appendix called “ The Principles of Newspeak,” which you can hear read at the top of the post. ![]() It’s entirely plausible that “alternative facts,” or “ altfacts,” would fit right into the “Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary,” though it might easily fall out of favor and “be suppressed later.” No telling if it would make the cut for “the final, perfected version” of Newspeak, “as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary.” 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. (We might call Orwell’s English Socialists “ accelerationsts.”) Newspeak appears not through history or social change but through the will of the Party. In other words, Newspeak isn’t just a set of buzzwords, but the deliberate replacement of one set of words in the language for another. The transition is still in progress in the fictional 1984, but is expected to be completed “by about the year 2050.” Students of history and linguistics will recognize that this is a ludicrously accelerated pace for the complete replacement of one vocabulary and syntax by another. ![]()
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