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In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate.To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking.
In the year 1984, the government of Oceania, dominated by the Inner Party, uses the Newspeak language – a heavily simplified version of English – to control the speech, actions, and thought of the population, by defining "unapproved thoughts" as thoughtcrime; for such actions, the Thinkpol arrest Winston Smith, the protagonist of the story, and Julia, his lover, as enemies of the state.
The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four.The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".
Orwellian is an adjective which is used to describe a situation, an idea, or a societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of ...
In Orwell's "1984," the Party that rules the nation of Oceania is in a constant state of war with surrounding nations. The same can be said about the world today, taking into consideration wars in ...
Orwell made a similar reference to the Ministry of Plenty in his allegorical work Animal Farm when, in the midst of a blight upon the farm, Napoleon the pig orders the silo to be filled with sand, then to place a thin sprinkling of grain on top, which fools human visitors into being dazzled about Napoleon's boasting of the farm's superior economy.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky comment in their book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media that Orwellian doublespeak is an important component of the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called dichotomization, a component of media propaganda involving "deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news."
Orwell's doublethink is also credited with having inspired the commonly used term doublespeak, which itself does not appear in the book.Comparisons have been made between doublespeak and Orwell's descriptions on political speech from his essay "Politics and the English Language", in which "unscrupulous politicians, advertisers, religionists, and other 'doublespeakers' of whatever stripe ...