Singsoc Simpletons

Anticipated by George Orwell

by Sachi Sri Kantha, December 4, 2010

‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, the novel by George Orwell (aka Eric Blair, 1903-1950), presented a nightmarish vision that is still of relevance to many totalitarian societies based on Theravada Buddhism ideology, like Myanmar (known as Burma during Orwell’s time and where he spent some years), Sri Lanka and Thailand. The year 2010 being the 60th death anniversary year of George Orwell, a revisit to this Orwellian masterpiece, is topical and of some relevance. Words specific to Orwellian vocabulary such as ‘The Ministry of Truth’, ‘Big Brother’ ‘an Enemy of the People’, ‘Two Minutes Hate’, ‘duckspeak’, ‘Thought Police’, and ‘sex crime’ have found resonance in the Blessed Island.

A recent amusing piece of news from the blessed island such as “Sri Lanka launches anti-porn initiative” [Swaminathan Natarajan, BBC News, November 5, 2010] and “Sri Lanka ‘pornographers’ outed in police crackdown” [Charles Haviland, BBC News, November 9, 2010] revealed that a totalitarian society, fictionally visualized by George Orwell in 1949, is alive now in Sri Lanka. Not only sex crime, but also political crimes as adjudged by the Big Brother and his ruling coterie will be punished.

Three vital items, which escaped Orwell’s fertile imagination in 1949 were as follows:

First, In Sri Lanka, there are 61 Ministers in the Cabinet (excluding Prime Minister D.M. Jayaratne), and 31 Deputy Ministers, now functioning under President Mahinda Rajapaksa! This number shall be a record. Apart from the President and Prime Minister, there are 9 “Senior Ministers” and 50 “Other Cabinet Ministers”.

Secondly, a love with ‘affairs’ by Sri Lankan rulers. There seems to have been some kind of ‘language drought’ in English. I counted ten different ‘affairs’ among the 62 Cabinet ranks listed in the Official website of the Government of Sri Lanka. Here is the list.

Buddha Sasana & Religious Affairs

Rural Affairs

Urban Affairs

Scientific Affairs

External Affairs

Public Administration & Home Affairs

Parliamentary Affairs

Child Development and Women’s Affairs

Culture and Aesthetic Affairs

Public Coordination and Public Affairs

The dictionary in my desk [Microsoft Encarta Dictionary, 2004] provides only 6 interpretations for this word ‘affair’, when used as noun: (1) a business matter, (2) an incident, especially a scandalous one, (3) a responsibility or concern, (4) a social event, (5) an object of a particular kind, and (6) a sexual relationship between two people who are not married to each other. In all probabilities, the responsible politicians should be concerned with either 1st or 3rd interpretations. But, as things happen in Sri Lanka (especially the last month’s news, relating to anti-porn initiative), all six interpretations have to be taken seriously.

One cannot fathom how George Orwell, an authority on English language, had missed the significance of ‘affairs’ in his ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, composed in 1949. It would have become news if President Rajapaksa had created a ‘Ministry of Truth’ to honor George Orwell.

Thirdly, Sri Lankan rulers would never ever accept that they are in the wrong. What they always project, is the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ propaganda. President Rajapaksa seems to have run into trouble with the Oxford Union lately. Rather than sportingly accept his faults like a ‘well-bred gentleman’, the Big Brother propaganda deflects the blame into ‘Two Minutes Hate’. Here is the complete text of a commentary from Singsoc Thought Police “official website of the Government of Sri Lanka” [www.priu.gov.lk]. It was entitled, “When terror strikes at Freedom of Speech”, dated December 2, 2010.

“The savage arm of terror of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that has with its bloody trail of assassinations and other killings, especially of all persons who opposed its violence, and silenced the voices of dissent among the Tamil community, in Sri Lanka and abroad, has now struck at the home of free speech – the Oxford Union.

In canceling the address by President Rajapaksa for what it states are security threats from unnamed, but readily identifiable sources, those who lead the Oxford Union today have made it clear they are incapable of living up to the laudable standards of those who went before them in upholding their belief in the Freedom of Speech.

The decision of the Oxford Union to invite the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to address its members was in keeping with its policy of inviting a broad range of prominent politicians, Heads of State, other key opinion makers and blazers of new thinking from around the world.

Founded in 1823 as a forum for discussion and debate, at a time when the free exchange of ideas was a notion foreign to the restrictive University authorities, it proceeded to become the best known defender of the Freedom of Speech and upholder of dissent, which are at the very core of Democracy.

The source of the security threat to the Oxford Union, its members, and invitees did not operate behind an impenetrable curtain of secrecy. It is none other than the pro-LTTE Tamil expatriate lobby in the UK, and their fellow travelers among extremists, unthinking radicals, vote hungry politicians, and those bleeding hearts who are still carrying the burdens of Britain’s past record of colonialism and imperialism. There is little doubt that the remnants of the LTTE have successfully manoeuvered these varied groups into giving them the appearance of a powerful organization, enabled by the easy use of the Internet, modern communications technology and sophisticated propaganda.

This security threat that has frightened the Oxford Union today is the result of manipulation by a hard core group of LTTE cadres still marketing the policies of violence and terror, under the pretence of speaking for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, and regrettably supported by a handful of the foreign media.

There is not much difficulty in identifying the source of this threat as being the same as those who carried a miscalculated demonstration at Heathrow Airport, when President Rajapaksa arrived in the UK last Monday. All the banners that were on display and the slogans that were shouted at the Meeting Point at the Arrival section of Heathrow made it clear that the organizers were the rump of the LTTE still functioning in the UK, and claiming to be a Tamil Diaspora. They have no intent of ever returning to their homeland of Sri Lanka, and not even to the failed dreamland of a Tamil Eelam, to achieve which Velupillai Prabhakaran shed so much blood of the Sri Lankan Tamils and other communities in Sri Lanka, while carrying on the most profitable trade in arms smuggling and human trafficking, among other crimes.

The buckling of the Oxford Union under threats from such forces raises serious questions for the future of democracy in the UK itself, as well as in other western democracies that through their refugee and asylum laws, and often misguided protection to those who falsely claim to be under threat in their countries of origin, give an open ticket to action to criminal and extremist elements.

The LTTE with its fellow travelers have bitten the hand that fed them, and shamed the land that gave them shelter in what they succeeded in doing at the Oxford Union. The inability to take necessary action against the highly bloated threats from such groups is not what is expected from a country where modern policing began with Sir Robert Peel and his Bobbies; is the home of Scotland Yard, and boasts of a Special Anti-Terrorism Laws and institutions.

The fear of violence that drove the leaders of the Oxford Union to their shameful act of giving in to terror, and especially the targeting of Freedom of Speech, is a timely and apt demonstration of the dangers that democracies face in giving shelter to those who are avowedly against the very principles of democracy.

This is also an eye opener to the very large number of moderate Tamils, whether in the UK or elsewhere, on the need to mobilize to overcome the disgrace and danger that a group of extremist Tamils, imbued with the belief in violence and terror, brings to the Tamil people, whether in Sri Lanka or outside; people who have a worthy heritage of tolerance, understanding and non-violence in community relations. Are they to give the leadership of the Tamils worldwide to those who have the least respect for democracy and its core principle of Freedom of Speech?

It is indeed a sad day for Democracy that this assault on Freedom of Speech took place in the land that has the Mother of Parliaments and which takes great pains, at times even misguided, to spread democracy to other countries, societies and cultures.

It is an even worse day for the Oxford Union to be led by the people of straw, who lack the spine to stand up to threats of violence that target the very foundation of Free Speech on which the Union has been built. If it follows this beginning, will the Oxford Union be anymore able to throw up the democratic leaders of the world as it has done since its inception?

Let Freedom of Speech thrive against terror, with the Oxford Union regaining glory in its protection.”

No wonder George Orwell would have been delighted! Those who have missed reading the original text of ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ can read it below to check how cleverly George Orwell had anticipated ‘Mahinda Chintana’ in 1949. It has been recorded that after the publication of Nineteen Eighty Four, Orwell had said: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive.” That Orwell’s prediction had hit a bull’s eye is proved, if one reads the following revision of mine. I have not exaggerated Orwell’s text.

I have only made five alterations to Orwell’s original text of 1949, that appeared as an appendix to ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ novel – the famous ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ - can provide an update to the current mood prevailing in the Blessed Island. I made the following alterations.

(1) ‘IngSoc’ changed to ‘SingSoc’. (IngSoc, referred to ‘English Society’.)

(2) ‘Oceania’ changed to ‘SriLania’.

(3) ‘English’ changed to ‘Sinhala’

(4) ‘The Times’ changed to ‘MaRaPa Times’ (MaRaPa, referring to Mahinda Rajapaksa)

(5) ‘1984’ changed to ‘2005’.

"The Principles of Newspeak", with apologies to George Orwell

[Note: The words in italics are as in the Original material (1949) of Orwell. I have taken the liberty to abbreviate the complete text which I’ve indicated in bold font within parenthesis, and made a few qualifying additions. My changes are shown in bold font, to distinguish them from Orwell’s text.]

Newspeak was the official language of SriLania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Singsoc, or Sinhala Socialism. In the year 2005 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the MaRaPa Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 2005, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, [as in 2010] that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of SingSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of SingSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

The A vocabulary: The A vocabulary consisted of words needed for the business of everyday life --- For such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess -- words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary, their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and noun form, when of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was involved here; in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and a verb of kindred meanings were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus, for example, speedful meant "rapid" and speedwise meant "quickly." Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a few already ending in -wise; the -wise termination was invariable. the word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.

In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in the language -- could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold". It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --indeed better-- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below, all inflections followed the same rules. Thus in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.

The B vocabulary: 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 Singsoc 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.

The B words were in all cases compound words. (* Compound words such as speakwrite, were 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, or portions of 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 and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful,-paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a MaRaPa Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Singsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of Sinhala Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Singsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Singsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words [such as Mahinda Chintana] covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. [82 words omitted.] His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex -- that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of SriLanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department,[5 words omitted] was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

[93 words omitted] the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Singsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to quack like a duck'. [For instance, Tamils and Muslims who are in need of Rajapaksa munificence have to quack like a duck.] Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when MaRaPa Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

The C vocabulary: The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Singsoc.

From the foregoing 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 Singsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and 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 red-haired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal 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 2005, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. 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. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Singsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

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