Newspeak and the B Vocabulary

This post was inspired by Brian Watt's post, A Helpful Guide to Cancelling “Mother”. Reading of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers' proposal to replace "mother" with "inseminated person" made me wonder if there shouldn't be some award akin to the popular Darwin Awards to be presented for torturing language for political ends. Something, say, called "Orwell Awards" -- in honor of George Orwell's NewSpeak Dictionary from his dystopian novel, 1984. But, it turns out that there is in fact an existing Orwell Award that, sadly, stands for exactly the opposite:

It is awarded annually to "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse."^[1]

The closest thing that comes to my conception is a Doublespeak Award presented by the same organization as the Orwell Award:

An ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.

But this doesn't get quite to my meaning. The award I have in mind would be presented to persons who really embrace the spirit that George Orwell described:

Newspeak was ... devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. *** The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

In Orwell's description of Newspeak, he differentiated between three categories of words: Basic words that were needed to indicate directions or basic needs such as eating, drinking, working (the "A" vocabulary); scientific terms (labeled the "C" vocabulary); and "words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes" (the "B" vocabulary). Here is a fuller explanation of the B vocabulary:

Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. *** The B words were in all cases compound words....They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. *** But the special function of certain Newspeak words...was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. *** As we have already seen in the case of the word FREE, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meaning purged out of them. *** No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. *** So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. *** Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the high brain centres at all. --George Orwell's 1984, Appendix

When you read this section -- the description of Orwell's Newspeak B vocabulary and its intention -- do you not recognize an affinity between "inseminated person," "anti-fascist," "anti-racism," and the like with Orwell's Newspeak? Of course, in Orwell's formulation, "inseminated person" would likely become INSEMSON. In this way, "mother" (two syllables) would be replaced by INSEMSON (three syllables) rather than Evers' seven-syllable monster.

All of these progressive speech inventions clearly carry out the intention of Newspeak. "Anti-fascism" is actually fascist; "Anti-racism" is actually racist. This goes beyond the Doublespeak Awards that make fun of verbal foibles or incomplete deceptions easily unmasked and ridiculed. Newspeak is an attack on truth itself.

Is there also not an affinity between "talking points" and Newspeak? The same words repeated endlessly from multiple outlets in both legacy and social media. When the same word -- not the same concept, the identical word -- is expressed with discipline and persistence you are experiencing a Newspeak moment.

As Orwell stated: "Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the high brain centres at all."

The purveyors of Newspeak need to be called out, every time, employing the same technique: "That is Newspeak". Let's make it a thing. Language must grow and develop ever greater nuance, not atrophy in service to tyranny.

Maybe the worst offenders should receive Newspeak Awards.