Replies

...In my view, the thinking came first. We flippantly call it political correctness. Actually, it is neither political nor correct.....I have watched it grow and prosper. It started in the racial equality movement when the utterance of words became major racial issues. It then spead to the media where the common names of countries and cities were changed to a more generic name to prevent insulting other countries. The use of the term "foreign", was even prohibited. Then came the names of sports organizations like the "tomahawks" and now the "redskins". The awful offensive names.....Now in the name of kindness we remove words, change words, and ban songs, poems, and anything that could remotely be offensive to someone, somewhere, or somehow...

Big Brother's Ingsoc Party (English Socialism) has perfected the uses of high technology to monitor the lives of its populace, and to insure unswerving loyalty through surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing. The government's most brilliant and most appalling project is the actual deconstruction of the English language into Newspeak, the language of the Party. Each successive edition of the Newspeak Dictionary has fewer words than its predecessor. By removing meaning and nuance from the vocabulary, the government hopes to eradicate seditious and anti-social thinking before it even has the chance to enter a person's mind. Without the vocabulary for revolution, there can be no revolution. For those who persist in thinking for themselves, so-called Thought Criminals, Ingsoc's stormtroopers, the Thought Police, are there to intervene, incarcerating the free-thinkers in the Ministry of Love, where they will be re-educated, or worse. 1984