From the aforegoing account it will be seen


THAT
in Newspeak
the expression of unorthodox opinions,
above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible

It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy:
it would have been possible, for example, to say "BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD"! But this statement,
which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument,
because the necessary words were not available.

Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together & condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak.

For example, ALL MANS ARE EQUAL was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth - i.e. that all men are equal in size, weight or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word EQUAL! In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meaning.

In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in
DOUBLETHINK
to avoid doing this,
but within a couple of generations
even the possibility
of such a lapse
would have
vanished
...
sneaky
18 mrt 2013 - bewerkt op 20 mrt 2013 - meld ongepast verhaal
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