酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Newspeak: A Vision of the World

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

During long decades of the Cold War, perhaps no book better captured the moral objections against totalitarian Communism than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four; it still remains the most powerful warning against the dangers of a totalitarian society. Nineteen Eighty-Four is one the most famous novels of dystopia, and shows the worst human society imaginable1. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania, is bleak: individualism is totally suppressed under the horrible control of the ruling Party. Orwell’s work details the seemingly useless efforts of one individual, Winston Smith, to resist, to retain a personal sense of uniqueness. In keeping with this goal, Smith commits innumerable crimes, solely defined by the Party, throughout the novel, ranging from writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, to having an illegal love affair with Julia, to getting himself secretly indoctrinated into the anti-Party Brotherhood. The end of the novel reveals Smith’s rebellion as playing into O’Brien’s campaign of physical and psychological torture, transforming Smith into a loyal subject of Big Brother2. The whole plot is built around Smith’s mind and life. This gives Orwell the opportunity to focus on the reaction of the individual to totalitarianism, love and cruelty; moreover, it enables the reader to observe and to understand the harsh oppression and skillful manipulations of language that the Party, Big Brother, and the Thought Police institute.

Of course, the world did not fall under totalitarian control of the Party as envisioned by Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four still remains an important novel: in part for the warning it issues against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for its penetrating analysis of the ways that manipulations of language can be used as a mechanism of control. Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, the actual fighting with neighboring countries is tightly interwoven with a rhetorical war, which has sustained itself mainly by calling attention to the performative nature of language. In Orwell’s view, language is a more important battlefield. He stresses that language has the influential power in politics to mask the truth, re-write history, and therefore mislead and control the public. He wishes to increase public awareness of this power. He accomplishes this by placing a great focus on Newspeak, the official language of Oceania and the language Oceania intends to complete by the year 2050. The aim of my essay is to show how language can be used politically to deceive and to manipulate people, and I shall argue that language becomes a thought-control weapon. Further, I suggest that Orwell’s conception of language is in line with contemporary studies in linguistics and sheds its light in understanding the abusive use of language in the political arena today.

Firstly, by design, Newspeak cuts back on vocabulary. One of the Newspeak specialists, Syme, says to Smith, “We’re cutting the language down to the bone… Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.”3 Newspeak is designed according to the rules of anti-heretical thought, and reduced to simply three categories: the A vocabulary is for daily life use, the B vocabulary for political purposes, and the C vocabulary for science and technology. Each type of vocabulary is isolated and independent of the others. Moreover, each word only expresses one clearly understood concept, and no association occurs. For example, ‘All human races are equal’ is a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which ‘All human races have black hair’ is a possible Oldspeak, which means English, sentence. Apparently, it does not have any grammatical error, but it expresses an arresting untruth—i.e., that all men are of equal height, weight, or size. The idea of political equality no longer exists, and this connotative meaning has accordingly been rubbed out of the word ‘equal’4.

Secondly, the direct impact of cutting back vocabularies is to narrow the range of thought. Syme also reveals this intention to Smith, “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.”5 These specific features of Newspeak that help restrict thought are reduced complexity, few abstractions, and no self-reference. Since one word arouses only one concept in the mind, and no literary or political or philosophical connections will occur, ultimately, it will let people lose their ability to think deeply and creatively; moreover, it will reduce people’s minds to a naïve state and restrict their understanding of the real world. Therefore, it is ideal for a totalitarian system, in which the government has to rely on a passive public that lacks independent thought and which has a great tolerance for mistakes, both past and present6.

Thirdly, one serious consequences of narrow thought is to make thoughtcrime impossible. Syme again mentions to Smith, “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.”7 To create a naïve mind for the public, the Party reduces many words with negative meanings, and includes them in one generalized term or uses abbreviations to stand for them. For example, the Party wants each Oceanian to keep an innocent mind about ., so in Newspeak, there are only two terms in reference to . due to reduction. One is sexcrime, and the other is goodsex, which respectively represent bad and good. To prevent people from being inspired by bad ., the B vocabulary never discusses sexual transgressions in detail. People only get the vague idea that behavior which disagrees with goodsex is bad, and that actions which diverge from ‘normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman’ are called sexcrime. For the same reason, words that deal with the ideas of freedom or equality, like democracy, religion, internationalism, etc., are destroyed, and replaced by one obscure word: crimethink. Therefore, in Newspeak it is seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that is heretical; beyond that point necessary words are nonexistent. In addition, abbreviations have one important function: in abbreviating a name one narrows and subtly alters its meaning by cutting most of the associations that would cling to it. In this way of thinking, the public will not be contaminated by heretical thoughts when they see the abbreviated word, ‘Comintern’, which stands for Communist International, and is harmless to orthodox thinking8. By reducing words and using compound words and abbreviations, the obvious purpose of Newspeak is to enclose people in an orthodox pseudo-reality, isolate them from the real world, and ultimately make thoughtcrime impossible.

Finally, another damaging effect coming from narrow thought is effectively to shorten the public’s memory. The Party deprives people of their own words and in so doing, deprives them of memory. For instance, after O’Brien forces Smith to embrace the ideology of the Party, Smith’s imagination decays and he can no longer fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. Smith, like the majority of the public, suffers when he is robbed of his words and thoughts. Consequently, memory, with its abundant richness and variety, decays since memories die when they go unrehearsed in words9. Moreover, once people use Newspeak habitually, and Oldspeak is gradually forgotten, all connections through using Oldspeak with the outside world and with memories of past events will be unthinkable. Orwell states in the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, The principles of Newspeak, that “when Oldspeak has been once and for all superceded, the last link with the past would have been severed”10. In this way, not only is all history rewritten, but also all records of the past will become unreadable. As a result, people radically lose their ability to grasp the essence of words from the past, and the collective memory of the public will be gradually shortened and diminished.

In short, the manipulation of language is a gigantic project in Oceania. By design, Newspeak cuts back the vocabulary, then narrows down the range of thought, and ultimately makes thoughtcrime impossible and shortens the public’s memory. The Party not only reduces language as a means with which to express the philosophy and thoughts that are permitted, and to make all other sorts of thinking impossible, but it also reduces people to Party machines without individual thought. Anticipatedly, by 2050, “there will be no thought because orthodox means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodox is unconsciousness”11. This situation relates to a new word in Newspeak, crimestop; the Party has trained people, like machines, to automatically stop any kind of heretical thoughts. We can include the idea that Newspeak can be used politically to deceive and to manipulate people, thus leading to a society in which people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality, and language becomes the thought-control weapon in the hands of a totalitarian state ruled by the Party. By skillfully manipulating language, the Party successfully dominates people’s thought.

George Orwell’s conception of language as a thought-control weapon is not his imaginative idea, but it has a solid ground rooted in linguistics. Based on the principles and purpose of designing Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is fair to say that George Orwell is a strong linguistic determinist, who states that language actually determines thought. His conception of language is in the line with contemporary studies in linguistics, which emphasize the idea that language moulds our vision of the world: " The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."12

It is worthy of notice that the above passage quoted from Edward Sapir’s work speaks about two worlds: the real world, presumably so-called physical reality, and the social reality of the group. Sapir puts an emphasis on the idea that the language that people speak determines how they see the world, an echo back to Orwell’s the purpose of Newspeak: “to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc.”13

Ernst Cassirer takes a similar stance as well: "Before the intellectual work of conceiving and understanding of phenomena can set in, the work of naming must have preceded it, and have reached a certain point of elaboration. For it is this process transforms the world of sense impression, which animals also process, into a mental world, a world of ideas and meanings. All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosophy, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him."14

The key theme in Cassirer’s conception is that language is the condition and expression of thought and consequently, knowledge is symbolization, not the reflection of reality. All such manipulations of language and reality past and present, portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be achieved only because the referent does not motivate the sign, because the semiotic world is a social product and accepted as the only social reality by Oceanians. The characteristics of Newspeak grammar all serve obfuscation with “an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech.”15

Behind all of his relentless criticisms of totalitarian society, there is a troubling, yet neglected outcry that the real threat is to human language and, thus, to human reason and even worse to the human soul. Certainly, the horrifying implications, though taken to the extreme, of Newspeak point out this central theme. Orwell, like many other literary scholars, is interested in the modern use of language and, in particular, the abuse and misuse of English. The language crisis is clearly expressed at the outset of his essay entitled Politics and the English Language, which states that better use of language facilitates better development in politics, and ultimately, makes a better world: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."16

Today, in political language, always bursting with catch phrases and slogans, Orwell foresees the particular threat: "Such phrases will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself…. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine."17

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell vividly depicts this kind of machine-like humanness, “This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.”18 The implication of men becoming “machines,” serves as Orwell’s darkest forecast, quite illuminating in our technology-obsessed culture.

There is no doubt that some of readers will feel that Orwell’s vision of Newspeak is simply the abuse of language taken to an extreme. However, we can all ‘Newspeak’ to the prevalent use of ‘spin’ today, and ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘double speak’ are manifested in political correctness and media censorship. In his mind, language is not a natural growth but a powerful ideological instrument which we shape and use for our own purposes. To him, it is crystal clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes and that political chaos is connected with the decay of language.

Armed with his view about language as a mechanism of control, maybe we can think clearly, which is a necessary first step toward cultural and political regeneration. Then we can identify the real message behind all the spin twisting into and going around in the world of politics, big business, advertising and public relations; eventually, we can probably bring about some improvement in the way we use language today.
References

1. Philips, Brain. “Context” In Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984.
2. Philips, Brain. “Analysis of Major Characters” In Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984.
3. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 54-55.
4. Ibid. 323.
5. Ibid. 55.
6. Berkes, Jem. Language as the Ultimate Weapons in Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/-umberkes/1984_langauge_html.
7. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990.55.
8. Joyce Liu, Two-Staged Reduction in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four. Taipei: Master Thesis of Fu-Jen University, 2001. 26-28.
9. Berkes, Jem. Language as the Ultimate Weapons in Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/-umberkes/1984_langauge_html.
10. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 324.
11. Ibid. 56.
12. Sapir, Edward. “A Study in Phonetic Symbolism,” In David G. Mandelbaum. (ed.) Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Los Angels: University of California Press, 1949. 162.
13. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 304.
14. Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. New York: Dover Publications, 1946. 28.
15. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 304.
16. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. 1 December 2005. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.
17. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. 1 December 2005. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.
18. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 57.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Newspeak: A Vision of the World

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

During long decades of the Cold War, perhaps no book better captured the moral objections against totalitarian Communism than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four; it still remains the most powerful warning against the dangers of a totalitarian society. Nineteen Eighty-Four is one the most famous novels of dystopia, and shows the worst human society imaginable1. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania, is bleak: individualism is totally suppressed under the horrible control of the ruling Party. Orwell’s work details the seemingly useless efforts of one individual, Winston Smith, to resist, to retain a personal sense of uniqueness. In keeping with this goal, Smith commits innumerable crimes, solely defined by the Party, throughout the novel, ranging from writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, to having an illegal love affair with Julia, to getting himself secretly indoctrinated into the anti-Party Brotherhood. The end of the novel reveals Smith’s rebellion as playing into O’Brien’s campaign of physical and psychological torture, transforming Smith into a loyal subject of Big Brother2. The whole plot is built around Smith’s mind and life. This gives Orwell the opportunity to focus on the reaction of the individual to totalitarianism, love and cruelty; moreover, it enables the reader to observe and to understand the harsh oppression and skillful manipulations of language that the Party, Big Brother, and the Thought Police institute.

Of course, the world did not fall under totalitarian control of the Party as envisioned by Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four still remains an important novel: in part for the warning it issues against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for its penetrating analysis of the ways that manipulations of language can be used as a mechanism of control. Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, the actual fighting with neighboring countries is tightly interwoven with a rhetorical war, which has sustained itself mainly by calling attention to the performative nature of language. In Orwell’s view, language is a more important battlefield. He stresses that language has the influential power in politics to mask the truth, re-write history, and therefore mislead and control the public. He wishes to increase public awareness of this power. He accomplishes this by placing a great focus on Newspeak, the official language of Oceania and the language Oceania intends to complete by the year 2050. The aim of my essay is to show how language can be used politically to deceive and to manipulate people, and I shall argue that language becomes a thought-control weapon. Further, I suggest that Orwell’s conception of language is in line with contemporary studies in linguistics and sheds its light in understanding the abusive use of language in the political arena today.

Firstly, by design, Newspeak cuts back on vocabulary. One of the Newspeak specialists, Syme, says to Smith, “We’re cutting the language down to the bone… Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.”3 Newspeak is designed according to the rules of anti-heretical thought, and reduced to simply three categories: the A vocabulary is for daily life use, the B vocabulary for political purposes, and the C vocabulary for science and technology. Each type of vocabulary is isolated and independent of the others. Moreover, each word only expresses one clearly understood concept, and no association occurs. For example, ‘All human races are equal’ is a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which ‘All human races have black hair’ is a possible Oldspeak, which means English, sentence. Apparently, it does not have any grammatical error, but it expresses an arresting untruth—i.e., that all men are of equal height, weight, or size. The idea of political equality no longer exists, and this connotative meaning has accordingly been rubbed out of the word ‘equal’4.

Secondly, the direct impact of cutting back vocabularies is to narrow the range of thought. Syme also reveals this intention to Smith, “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.”5 These specific features of Newspeak that help restrict thought are reduced complexity, few abstractions, and no self-reference. Since one word arouses only one concept in the mind, and no literary or political or philosophical connections will occur, ultimately, it will let people lose their ability to think deeply and creatively; moreover, it will reduce people’s minds to a naïve state and restrict their understanding of the real world. Therefore, it is ideal for a totalitarian system, in which the government has to rely on a passive public that lacks independent thought and which has a great tolerance for mistakes, both past and present6.

Thirdly, one serious consequences of narrow thought is to make thoughtcrime impossible. Syme again mentions to Smith, “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.”7 To create a naïve mind for the public, the Party reduces many words with negative meanings, and includes them in one generalized term or uses abbreviations to stand for them. For example, the Party wants each Oceanian to keep an innocent mind about ., so in Newspeak, there are only two terms in reference to . due to reduction. One is sexcrime, and the other is goodsex, which respectively represent bad and good. To prevent people from being inspired by bad ., the B vocabulary never discusses sexual transgressions in detail. People only get the vague idea that behavior which disagrees with goodsex is bad, and that actions which diverge from ‘normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman’ are called sexcrime. For the same reason, words that deal with the ideas of freedom or equality, like democracy, religion, internationalism, etc., are destroyed, and replaced by one obscure word: crimethink. Therefore, in Newspeak it is seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that is heretical; beyond that point necessary words are nonexistent. In addition, abbreviations have one important function: in abbreviating a name one narrows and subtly alters its meaning by cutting most of the associations that would cling to it. In this way of thinking, the public will not be contaminated by heretical thoughts when they see the abbreviated word, ‘Comintern’, which stands for Communist International, and is harmless to orthodox thinking8. By reducing words and using compound words and abbreviations, the obvious purpose of Newspeak is to enclose people in an orthodox pseudo-reality, isolate them from the real world, and ultimately make thoughtcrime impossible.

Finally, another damaging effect coming from narrow thought is effectively to shorten the public’s memory. The Party deprives people of their own words and in so doing, deprives them of memory. For instance, after O’Brien forces Smith to embrace the ideology of the Party, Smith’s imagination decays and he can no longer fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. Smith, like the majority of the public, suffers when he is robbed of his words and thoughts. Consequently, memory, with its abundant richness and variety, decays since memories die when they go unrehearsed in words9. Moreover, once people use Newspeak habitually, and Oldspeak is gradually forgotten, all connections through using Oldspeak with the outside world and with memories of past events will be unthinkable. Orwell states in the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, The principles of Newspeak, that “when Oldspeak has been once and for all superceded, the last link with the past would have been severed”10. In this way, not only is all history rewritten, but also all records of the past will become unreadable. As a result, people radically lose their ability to grasp the essence of words from the past, and the collective memory of the public will be gradually shortened and diminished.

In short, the manipulation of language is a gigantic project in Oceania. By design, Newspeak cuts back the vocabulary, then narrows down the range of thought, and ultimately makes thoughtcrime impossible and shortens the public’s memory. The Party not only reduces language as a means with which to express the philosophy and thoughts that are permitted, and to make all other sorts of thinking impossible, but it also reduces people to Party machines without individual thought. Anticipatedly, by 2050, “there will be no thought because orthodox means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodox is unconsciousness”11. This situation relates to a new word in Newspeak, crimestop; the Party has trained people, like machines, to automatically stop any kind of heretical thoughts. We can include the idea that Newspeak can be used politically to deceive and to manipulate people, thus leading to a society in which people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality, and language becomes the thought-control weapon in the hands of a totalitarian state ruled by the Party. By skillfully manipulating language, the Party successfully dominates people’s thought.

George Orwell’s conception of language as a thought-control weapon is not his imaginative idea, but it has a solid ground rooted in linguistics. Based on the principles and purpose of designing Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is fair to say that George Orwell is a strong linguistic determinist, who states that language actually determines thought. His conception of language is in the line with contemporary studies in linguistics, which emphasize the idea that language moulds our vision of the world: " The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."12

It is worthy of notice that the above passage quoted from Edward Sapir’s work speaks about two worlds: the real world, presumably so-called physical reality, and the social reality of the group. Sapir puts an emphasis on the idea that the language that people speak determines how they see the world, an echo back to Orwell’s the purpose of Newspeak: “to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc.”13

Ernst Cassirer takes a similar stance as well: "Before the intellectual work of conceiving and understanding of phenomena can set in, the work of naming must have preceded it, and have reached a certain point of elaboration. For it is this process transforms the world of sense impression, which animals also process, into a mental world, a world of ideas and meanings. All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosophy, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him."14

The key theme in Cassirer’s conception is that language is the condition and expression of thought and consequently, knowledge is symbolization, not the reflection of reality. All such manipulations of language and reality past and present, portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be achieved only because the referent does not motivate the sign, because the semiotic world is a social product and accepted as the only social reality by Oceanians. The characteristics of Newspeak grammar all serve obfuscation with “an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech.”15

Behind all of his relentless criticisms of totalitarian society, there is a troubling, yet neglected outcry that the real threat is to human language and, thus, to human reason and even worse to the human soul. Certainly, the horrifying implications, though taken to the extreme, of Newspeak point out this central theme. Orwell, like many other literary scholars, is interested in the modern use of language and, in particular, the abuse and misuse of English. The language crisis is clearly expressed at the outset of his essay entitled Politics and the English Language, which states that better use of language facilitates better development in politics, and ultimately, makes a better world: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."16

Today, in political language, always bursting with catch phrases and slogans, Orwell foresees the particular threat: "Such phrases will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself…. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine."17

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell vividly depicts this kind of machine-like humanness, “This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.”18 The implication of men becoming “machines,” serves as Orwell’s darkest forecast, quite illuminating in our technology-obsessed culture.

There is no doubt that some of readers will feel that Orwell’s vision of Newspeak is simply the abuse of language taken to an extreme. However, we can all ‘Newspeak’ to the prevalent use of ‘spin’ today, and ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘double speak’ are manifested in political correctness and media censorship. In his mind, language is not a natural growth but a powerful ideological instrument which we shape and use for our own purposes. To him, it is crystal clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes and that political chaos is connected with the decay of language.

Armed with his view about language as a mechanism of control, maybe we can think clearly, which is a necessary first step toward cultural and political regeneration. Then we can identify the real message behind all the spin twisting into and going around in the world of politics, big business, advertising and public relations; eventually, we can probably bring about some improvement in the way we use language today.
References

1. Philips, Brain. “Context” In Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984.
2. Philips, Brain. “Analysis of Major Characters” In Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984.
3. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 54-55.
4. Ibid. 323.
5. Ibid. 55.
6. Berkes, Jem. Language as the Ultimate Weapons in Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/-umberkes/1984_langauge_html.
7. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990.55.
8. Joyce Liu, Two-Staged Reduction in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four. Taipei: Master Thesis of Fu-Jen University, 2001. 26-28.
9. Berkes, Jem. Language as the Ultimate Weapons in Nineteen Eight-Four. 8 December 2004. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/-umberkes/1984_langauge_html.
10. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 324.
11. Ibid. 56.
12. Sapir, Edward. “A Study in Phonetic Symbolism,” In David G. Mandelbaum. (ed.) Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Los Angels: University of California Press, 1949. 162.
13. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 304.
14. Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. New York: Dover Publications, 1946. 28.
15. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 304.
16. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. 1 December 2005. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.
17. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. 1 December 2005. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.
18. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. 57.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[星子]

I will print it and read it tomorrow.
_________________

[[ANNA]]

I will print it and read it tomorrow.
_________________

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]