Monday, August 6, 2012

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 1 (page 46)

     He turned around. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department... he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary...
     "You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak.I've read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"...
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten... Every year fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

     Here, Orwell uses a character named Syme to explain that in the world of 1984, one of the ways the government is controlling the minds of its citizens is creating a new type of language with fewer and fewer words every year. People's vocabularies are getting smaller and smaller until they can't help but think the way the government wants them to, because they don't know how not to. Throughout his monologue, Syme has a quite excited tone, which shows how he is oblivious to the damage that he is causing to not only the current citizens of Oceania, but the future generations. He has been blinded by the government and convinced that he's doing everyone a favor by saving them from unnecessary intelligence.

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