You & I: Newspeak/Oldspeak traditions/innovations


THE B VOCABULARY/1903-'50 Eric Arthur Blair/George Orwell/India/Eton/Burma/Paris/Lancashire/Yorkshire/Spain/Manchester/London.

The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them ...

Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly: in some cases they could be trans-lated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, & at the same time more accurate & forcible than ordinary language.

The B words were in all cases compound words: compound words, such as SPEAKWRITE, we're of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour. They consisted of two or more words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb,
and inflected according to the ordinary rules.

To take a single example:
the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, 'ORTHODOXY',
or, if one chose to regard it as a verb,
'TO THINK IN AN ORTHODOX
MANNER'!

This inflected as follows:
noun-verb GOODTHINK; past tense & past particle GOODTHINKED;
present particle GOODTHINKING; adjective GOODTHINKFUL; adverb GOODTHINKWISE;
verbal noun GOODTHINKER.

ZÓIETS
past natuurlijk
prima i/d zwartwitlogica
van extreem 'links/rechts', vreemdelingenhaat/xenofobie,
kampen & eliminaties
zus of
zo
...
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