Eclecticology (Ray Saintonge) wrote in part:
Maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) wrote:
Again blacklisting terms is *very* bad and reminds me of something I read in the appendix of the book 1984 in which Orwell described Newspeak. The goal of the totalitarian state in 1984 had with Newspeak was thought control: By dropping certain terms from the language the concepts behind those terms would fall away from the conscious thoughts of people. Eliminating the word "freedom" for example, would help to stop the transmission of freedom-oriented ideas and thus would ease any want in the population for it.
Orwell's society did not ban the word "freedom". It just reserved the right to insist that you understood it in a politically correct way. Totalitarian principles are more effectively spread when the subject population believes that it has freely adopted those ideas.
Point of information:
I read 1984 again just last month, and this very word (well, the adjective "free") is addressed in the appendix.
Newspeak /did/ ban the word "free" (in its political sense) /entirely/. They did /not/ merely insists that you call Ingsoc free and dissent unfree. They wanted to make it /impossible/ for somebody to say something like "Hold on a minute -- maybe Ingsoc is not free after all!". A big point of Newspeak -- and how it went /beyond/ efforts in the USSR -- was the elimination, not merely restriction, of terms, for this reason.
BTW, the word "free" did survive in Newspeak, but in a different sense. You could say "My apartment is not free of cockroaches.", but not "My life under Ingsoc is not free." -- /that/ would be meaningless.
All in all, comparing Newspeak to political correctness is a huge exaggeration -- Newspeak just goes beyond anything that has occured in the real world (and thank goodness!). That was part of Orwell's point -- the other part of his point being that Newspeak might not be such an exaggeration in 1984. (Thank goodness that it still is!)
-- Toby