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The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

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Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#71

Post by josefx »

genera1 wrote: post #58
NackerHughes wrote: post #53

> Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. And now, COVID.

Ah yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease, totally in the same category as Gestapo

Technical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They even list tourism among the things that absolutely need protection against this type of language misuse[1].

[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#72

Post by hashkb »

boxed wrote: post #27
JKCalhoun wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell believed if language is pared down, so too are thoughts.

Making a language regular and less broken isn't the same as reducing it's cognitive power though. Think of it like this: if we made English even less regular would it make us better and freer thinkers? Of course not! It would probably make it harder to think clearly. A good example is how counting is hard to learn because the words are weirdband illogical. It's like converting between roman and Arabic numerals.

Or it'd give us way more options for clever poetry and songwriting. Which tends to make us better and freer thinkers. The weirder your language is, the weirder art you can make with it. The more the audience understands your nuances, the better the art, the more emotional the experience, the more happiness and empathy and connection (or fear and sadness and despair) you can project.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#73

Post by mdp2021 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #65
mdp2021 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> elimination of all redundant forms Does anything like that exist. Nuances are intellectual keys conceived for discrimination. Get proficiency over the language, and you will use 'learnings' when you mean learnings and 'lessons' when you mean lessons. It is having mental dominance over complexity. Simplification itself requires that dominance - it is thought management.

> Get proficiency over the language You'd ideally say proficient with the language, not over .

Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you "do something better with something", but I wanted to express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#74

Post by joophro »

genera1 wrote: post #58
NackerHughes wrote: post #53

> Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. And now, COVID.

Ah yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease, totally in the same category as Gestapo

>technical name

In an era where almost all viruses/diseases have been referred to by non-technical names, the rapid switch to a technical mouthful of “COVID-19” or “SARS CoV 2” is absolutely political.

I remember sitting at an airport last year watching newscasters denigrating the use of the term “Wuhan virus” as I had just walked past a sign warning about MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) just on the other side of security. It felt other-worldly. Then, after the CCP PR campaign of using the technical term had fully caught on, all of same news stations called the original variants the “UK/Kent variant” and the “Indian variant” for weeks/months until they caught themselves and switched to the Greek alphabet. And like programming with too much abstraction and bad variable names, the new Greek alphabet names for the variants actually obscure useful information — you no longer know where the hotbed locations are for each variant, and you have go looking online for their origins, instead of just having that info in the name.

West Nile, Guinea Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme disease, Ross River fever, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola, MERS, Marburg Virus, Spanish Flu, Lassa Fever, Legionnaires Disease. All without fanfare or protest. Wuhan virus? Oh, no no no. That would look bad for the party. Can’t have that.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#75

Post by godelski »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #16
civilized wrote: post #15

Newspeak's goal of a complete regularization of English, and the elimination of all redundant forms, is actually an interesting idea IMO. Business jargon often moves in this direction, e.g. "learnings" instead of "lessons". And it's not always a horrible dystopian idea - Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible to the masses with each iteration. EDIT: I apologize for my doubleplusungood thoughtcr…

Orwell believed if language is pared down, so too are thoughts.

There's an experimental language called Toki Pona[0]. It is just composed of 14 phonemes and 137 root words. It is meant to be learned in a weekend essentially. But you can't easily express abstract concepts in it because of its limitations. Though it was created to have users concentrate on basic things. So there's at least ways to experimentally test this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#76

Post by robertlagrant »

mdp2021 wrote: post #73
robertlagrant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get proficiency over the language You'd ideally say proficient with the language, not over .

Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you "do something better with something", but I wanted to express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").

I just sprang into existence to fulfil the internet's promise to correct someone who mentions correct language on the Internet. I shall now disappear.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#77

Post by fighterpilot »

Animats wrote: post #69
gotoeleven wrote: post #18

"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" I'm genuinely curious do the woke brigades of twitter not have the self awareness to recognize what they're doing? Or do they just not care? Would they be happy with a language designed to make 'harmful' thinking impossible?

Both "woke" ideology and MAGA ideology use words in this way. - Make America Great Again - Black Lives Matter - Stop the Steal - Homophobia - Drain the Swamp - Ableist - America First All of those exist to make it difficult to express an opposing viewpoint. Orwell would have recognized this.

Part of this has to be that catchphrases are more viral and are an effective way to signal allegiance to a group verbally due to their brevity.

It's everything I don't like in a single package. Unthinking, unoriginal, incendiary, devoid of specific meaning, used as a tribal marker, and used to elevate the status of the speaker without having contributed anything.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#78

Post by mynameishere »

dbattaglia wrote: post #4

This appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak" is written in a past tense when describing the language and the events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise presented in the book.

1984's original title was 1948. He was describing his time in the BBC and the general squalor and shifting loyalties of post-war Britain. Like most dystopian fiction the point is to criticize the current day, not gamble on being a prophet.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#80

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

Animats wrote: post #69
gotoeleven wrote: post #18

"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" I'm genuinely curious do the woke brigades of twitter not have the self awareness to recognize what they're doing? Or do they just not care? Would they be happy with a language designed to make 'harmful' thinking impossible?

Both "woke" ideology and MAGA ideology use words in this way. - Make America Great Again - Black Lives Matter - Stop the Steal - Homophobia - Drain the Swamp - Ableist - America First All of those exist to make it difficult to express an opposing viewpoint. Orwell would have recognized this.

The recent "Jan 6 was an act of love" (for Trump) is another good example. It was both true-in-a-sense (oxytocin doesn't make you less racist), and brilliant, in much the same way that "Proud Boys" was clever, but it seems to sail right over peoples' heads (Or they're just pretending not to get it. I can't tell.).

And some older political phrases could also be added to your list; for me the archetype is "Pro Life" vs. "Pro Choice".

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