Thread: Internet Speech
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Old Sep 22, 2003, 11:50 pm   #15 (permalink) (top)
Geoff332
Igneous Magma
 
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 309
Curiously, Orwell's main objection was to people who used language imprecisely or with stale imagery. Probably his best essay on political language, Politics and the English Language spends a lot of time analysing the way language is used poorly. He comes up with some wonderful lines, like "This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing." Using a tool implies intentional use. Without knowing who is using it, the statement is probably well described as imprecise.

Far be it from me to say what Orwell meant by Newsspeak, but my reading of 1984 and his non-fiction work such as this essay always lead me to believe he was referring to something quite different. Newsspeak was the deliberate usurption of language as a tool for political oppression -- achieved by attributing rhetorical meanings to phrases making them slogans: "War is peace" and so on. This is quite different from a new 'language' (really a new syntax and diction) from new media of communication.

Orwell did actually favour the development of new words. He claimed that "it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary, perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practically unmeanable to language" -- basically, our language was not suitable for describing our experience. I have no doubt that most of the things emerging from texting are not that useful, however, the idea that new media will lead to the requirement of new words and new ways of communicating is hardly an difficult one to defend.
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