Mind Your Language!

Words matter! I always thought that it was Karl Marx who said that if he was given twenty-six lead soldiers (meaning the blocks used in printing the alphabet), he would conquer the world, but, apparently it is a much older saying than that. The Americans claim it for Benjamin Franklin, and some think that comes from an earlier French saying. Be that as it may, words do matter because we generally think in words, and the words we use often determine the way in which we think.

Language goes quite a long way to determine national differences. Not very long ago, several countries called themselves “The People’s Democratic Republic of X.” When we saw that, we knew that often the country was neither the people’s, nor democratic. It was usually a nasty dictatorship. The term didn’t fool many people, but it put a respectable gloss upon unpleasant facts.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four has a brilliant satire upon this use of language. In the book the ruling party, Ingsoc [English Socialism], has replaced Standard English with Newspeak. Orwell writes

“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… 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. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings”. To read more, click here.