It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning; or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?
-from 1984 by George Orwell
I’m finally reading the book named after the year of my birth. It’s actually kind of hilarious that I haven’t read it before considering I’ve made Team Orwell jokes for a long time. But holy shit, you guys. Holy shit, read that quote. Breathtaking stuff. You could write essays, dissertations, about controlling the narrative by changing the meanings of words, about propaganda and the destruction of regimes and societies—or you could just sum it up in this jaw-dropping, elegant paragraph.
And by the way, this is happening now. It’s been happening for a long time. Think about all the girls you know that say “I’m not a feminist, but…” Yeah, who wants that equal pay/voting rights/control of your own body and life bullshit anyway? Oh, that’s not what you meant? Because that’s what it means. And that’s far from the only example.
Words are everything. They can be powerful, beautiful, yes, even dangerous, in a way nothing else can. That’s why I love them so much.