Newspeak, No thoughts, No Reality, Well done!

In the two courses we have had on Literature we have discussed how important language is for most, if not all, of the authors we have studied.

Certainly, language creates reality and is the means by which we can express our feelings, emotions, opinions and most important of all: our ideas. We need language to communicate with others and to make ourselves understood by these others. Therefore, the more words we have, the more accurately our ideas will be conveyed. That is why we need a vast range of vocabulary and every single word carries a meaning that can be weaker, stronger, ruder, more polite or even sweeter than other that is considered to be “synonym”.

Now, if you have a limited vocabulary, you will be sort of handicapped since you neither will be able to make yourself understood, nor will be able to understand what others are saying. To my mind, that is what The Inner Party intends to do by creating the Newspeak Vocabulary.

A suitable definition  of Newspeak would be that it was a way to provide a medium of expression for the devotees of Ingsoc. And as is stated in The Apprendix of 1984 by Orwell:

“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 meanings 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 by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This 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 dispensed 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”

We can infer, then, that once the Ingsoc has accomplished its goal, there was no other reality than the one it would impose and all possible rejections would be erased since anyone could possibly think nor express what and how they were feeling about the situation and the context in where they were living.

It seems really interesting to me, especially because nowadays in our Chilean Society… a sort of “Newspeak” Is appearing and increasing in an unstoppable way. I would seriously doubt who is really making and creating the Chilean Newspeak (television, politicians or central powers, you decide) but I am sure it is happening. We do not need to go further and start listening to our friends, relatives and people around us and then start thinking of how many meanings “piola”, “suave”, “mina” and some other “rude words” have.

Are we actually conveying our ideas properly? Are we creating the reality that we do want to create or the one that others are imposing us to do?

             “Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be                  squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what                           difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not                 alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that                you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to                          yourself, remained impregnable.” (Orwell)

Sources:

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewSpeak