As we not­ed yes­ter­day, and you like­ly noticed else­where, George Orwell’s clas­sic dystopi­an nov­el 1984 shot to the top of the charts—or the Ama­zon best­seller list—in the wake of “alter­na­tive facts,” the lat­est Orwellian coinage for bald-faced lying. The ridicu­lous phrase imme­di­ate­ly pro­duced a bar­rage of par­o­dies, hash­tags, and memes; healthy ways of vent­ing rage and dis­be­lief. But maybe there is a dan­ger there too, let­ting such words sink into the dis­course, lest they become what Orwell called “Newspeak.”

It’s easy to hear “Newspeak,” the “offi­cial lan­guage of Ocea­nia,” as “news speak.” This is per­fect­ly rea­son­able, but it gives us the impres­sion that it relates strict­ly to its appear­ance in mass media. Orwell obvi­ous­ly intend­ed the ambiguity—it is the lan­guage of offi­cial pro­pa­gan­da after all—but the port­man­teau actu­al­ly comes from the words “new speak”—and it has been cre­at­ed to super­sede “Old­speak,” Orwell writes, “or Stan­dard Eng­lish, as we should call it.”

In oth­er words, Newspeak isn’t just a set of buzz­words, but the delib­er­ate replace­ment of one set of words in the lan­guage for anoth­er. The tran­si­tion is still in progress in the fic­tion­al 1984, but is expect­ed to be com­plet­ed “by about the year 2050.” Stu­dents of his­to­ry and lin­guis­tics will rec­og­nize that this is a ludi­crous­ly accel­er­at­ed pace for the com­plete replace­ment of one vocab­u­lary and syn­tax by anoth­er. (We might call Orwell’s Eng­lish Social­ists “accel­er­a­tionsts.”) Newspeak appears not through his­to­ry or social change but through the will of the Par­ty.

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’s entire­ly plau­si­ble that “alter­na­tive facts,” or “alt­facts,” would fit right into the “Ninth and Tenth Edi­tions of the Newspeak Dic­tio­nary,” though it might eas­i­ly fall out of favor and “be sup­pressed lat­er.” No telling if it would make the cut for “the final, per­fect­ed ver­sion” of Newspeak, “as embod­ied in the Eleventh Edi­tion of the Dic­tio­nary.”

These quo­ta­tions come not from the main text of 1984 but from an appen­dix called “The Prin­ci­ples of Newspeak,” which you can hear read at the top of the post. Here, Orwell dis­pas­sion­ate­ly dis­cuss­es the “per­fect­ed” form of Newspeak, includ­ing its gram­mat­i­cal “pecu­liar­i­ties,” such as “an almost com­plete inter­change­abil­i­ty between dif­fer­ent parts of speech” (an issue cur­rent trans­la­tors have encoun­tered). He then intro­duces its vocab­u­lary, divid­ed into “three dis­tinct class­es,” A, B, and C.

The A class con­tains “every­day life” words that have been mutat­ed with cum­ber­some pre­fix­es and inten­si­fiers: “uncold” for warm, “plus­cold and dou­ble­plus­cold” for “very cold” and “superla­tive­ly cold.” The B class con­tains the com­pound words: sin­is­ter dou­ble­think coinages like “joy­camp (forced-labor camp)” and “Mini­pax (Min­istry of Peace, i.e. Min­istry of War).” These, Orwell explains, are sim­i­lar to “the char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures of polit­i­cal lan­guage… in total­i­tar­i­an coun­tries” of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

The cit­i­zen of Ocea­nia, Orwell tells us, must have “an out­look sim­i­lar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, with­out know­ing much else, that all nations oth­er than his own wor­shipped ‘false gods’.… His sex­u­al life, for exam­ple, was entire­ly reg­u­lat­ed by the two Newspeak words sex­crime (sex­u­al immoral­i­ty) and good­sex (chasti­ty).” The lat­ter includ­ed only “inter­course between man and wife, for the sole pur­pose of beget­ting chil­dren, and with­out phys­i­cal plea­sure on the part of he woman: all else was sex­crime.”

The C class of words may be the most insid­i­ous of all. While it “con­sist­ed entire­ly of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal terms” that “resem­bled the sci­en­tif­ic terms in use today,” the Par­ty took care “to define them rigid­ly and strip them of unde­sir­able mean­ings.” For exam­ple,

There was no vocab­u­lary express­ing the func­tion of Sci­ence as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irre­spec­tive of its par­tic­u­lar branch­es. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Sci­ence,’ any mean­ing that it could pos­si­bly bear being already suf­fi­cient­ly cov­ered by the word Ing­soc.

Orwell then goes on to dis­cuss the dif­fi­cul­ty of trans­lat­ing the work of the past into Newspeak. He uses as an exam­ple the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence: “All mans are equal was a pos­si­ble Newspeak sen­tence,” but only in that “it expressed a pal­pa­ble untruth—i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength.” As for the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s rous­ing pre­am­ble, “it would have been quite impos­si­ble to ren­der this into Newspeak,” writes Orwell. “The near­est one could come to doing so would be to swal­low the whole pas­sage up in the sin­gle word crime­think.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Best­selling Book on Ama­zon

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness