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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
> We can only hope that they deprecate vague images and slippery
> analogies in favor of sentences one of these days, but I'm not holding
> my breath.
"You think our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're
destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're
cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak
there'll be nothing else. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
The great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of
nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are
also the antonyms....
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at
the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand
such a conversation as we are having now?... Every concept that can ever be
needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly
defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Every year
fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
smaller...
"The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no
thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing
to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." -Syme (1984, pp. 46-47)
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