Tag Archives: George Orwell

The Parkland Trial (5): An Orwellian Prosecution

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In 1984, George Orwell described Newspeak, the language of the totalitarian regime depicted in the book, in this way:

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English speaker of our own day (George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classics, p. 300).

It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is an exact description of the language spoken by the prosecution in the Scot Peterson case. Consider a few examples from a CNN story on closing arguments in the case. Ask yourself what language the prosecution and its witnesses are speaking. Whatever it is, it’s not intelligible as English or any other natural language.  Continue reading →

Ignorance Is Strength

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Representative Peter T. King of New York, whose Long Island district Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in the April 19 primary, echoed other Republicans in pledging to vote for Mr. Trump even though he had reservations, calling Mr. Trump “a guy with no knowledge of what’s going on.”

–Patrick Healy, Jonathan Martin, and Maggie Haberman, “With Donald Trump in Charge, Republicans Have a Day of Reckoning,” The New York Times, May 4, 2016. Continue reading →

The Untarget Was Collateralized (Updated)

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From George Orwell’s 1984, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak”:

The B vocabulary. The 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 translated 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, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language. …

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. (pp. 249, 250).

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