Newspeak

‘Newspeak is the language of a totalitarian state. The ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrimes.’

Does this sound a little familiar to anyone else?

OK, I didn’t make this word up or the explanation of its meaning. Newspeak is a word that comes from the George Orwell novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is a must-read if you haven’t already. I can’t help thinking Mr Orwell could see the future when he wrote it in the 1940s. If you haven’t read it though, here is a brief breakdown thanks to Wikipedia (I would have rambled on for ages with my synopsis as it has so many elements that I find interesting).

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), is a dystopian novel, whose themes centre on the risks of government overreach, totalitarianism and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviours within society. The novel is set in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism and propaganda.

Now does it all sound a little more familiar?