The Destruction of Words

“We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.” (Orwell Part 1, Chapter5)

One of my favorite novels is 1984 by George Orwell. This book is significant because it shows the change the technology brings, and one part especially is the decline of vocabulary. In this future world, the people are forced to eliminate words they have previously used and adopt these new simpler words, and even created a new language, “Newspeak”. This leads to a huge connection between new media such as Twitter and Facebook, and how we speak in conversations. We have begun to adopt a new  language, people are starting to use “lol” as a word or phrase when speaking, and using shorter or simpler words. The reason for smaller and less depictive words in the novel was to limit the thoughts of the people, and to be able to manipulate them. When we destroy our vocabulary by using shorter or quicker phrases, we are limiting our ability to speak for ourselves. It prevents us from having our own voice; instead it becomes the same as everyone else’s. The only way that we can regain our ability to create complex sentences and thought is to read books that support it. In the world of 1984, the government used the new language as thought control, where no one could come up with anything significant because they were unable to produce a significant thought. The implication of this is how much we could lose by limiting our ability to project our own ideas. This lack of intelligence may lead to regress in our culture, to where we cannot keep up with progress and decline in new ideas and the advancement of our world. Isn’t it a scary thought that our future could change based on something so small, so little thought of as vocabulary? What would be left our language, so full of irony and wit, if we let it go to waste by forgetting it?

 “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words… 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” (Orwell Part 1, Chapter 5). The worst part to me is that we are not only accepting it, but also encouraging it. The novel was once thought of as prophetic, but I believe that we created a self-fulfilling prophesy. We have let ourselves watch TV or stay on Facebook instead of reading a novel. We have chosen to take the easy way out and make our language shorter and easier, instead of letting it challenge us. 

                                              12:30 to 15:25 on Video