George Orwell explored the power of language to shape our thinking, including the power of deliberately sloppy language to distort thought. He explored these concerns not only in his novels Animal Farm and 1984 but in his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language"...
...where he argues that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
The totalitarian regime depicted in 1984 requires citizens to communicate in Newspeak, a carefully controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate subversive concepts...
...such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will. With this bastardization of language, complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms conveying only simplistic meaning.
Newspeak purposefully eliminates the possibility of nuance; it renders impossible the consideration and communication of shades of meaning. Newspeak’s short words make speech physically automatic and largely unconscious, which further erodes the potential for critical thought.
Newspeak includes many simplified contractions: joycamp is a labor camp; Miniluv is the Ministry of Love, where secret police torture and interrogate dissidents; Minipax is the Ministry of Peace, responsible for waging war;
oldthink refers to ideas from the time before the Party’s revolution, such as objectivity and rationality; pornosec is the pornography production section of the Ministry of Truth’s fiction department; thinkpol is The Thought Police, the secret police force of the Party;
and unperson refers to someone who was executed, whose very existence is then erased from history and memory. Kind of like cancelled.
I will offer three examples of Newspeak that functioned during the pandemic to foreclose nuance, interrupt critical thought, and foreclose debate. These functioned not to communicate but to exclude the adversary and end all discussion: covid denier, anti-vax, conspiracy theorist.
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