In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunchqueue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very fulland deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steamof stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which didnot quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of theroom there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gincould be bought at ten cents the large nip.‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston’sback.He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in theResearch Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the rightword. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: butthere were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than thatof others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed,he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged incompiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Hewas a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed tosearch your face closely while he was speaking to you.‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,’ hesaid.‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. ‘I’ve triedall over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had twounused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was somenecessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply.Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool,sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. Youcould only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or lessfurtively on the ‘free’ market.‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he addeduntruthfully.The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turnedand faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray froma pile at the end of the counter.‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ saidSyme.‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it onthe flicks, I suppose.’‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know you,’ theeyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very well why youdidn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In an intellectual way,Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeablegloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, andtrials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in thecellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matterof getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, ifpossible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he wasauthoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little asideto avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think itspoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see themkicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.’‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On toeach was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a metal pannikinof pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug ofmilkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said Syme.‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpackedtheir trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of whichsomeone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had theappearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused foran instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuffdown. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenlydiscovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls ofthe stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes ofspongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins.From the table at Winston’s left, a little behind his back, someonewas talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost likethe quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of theroom.‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising hisvoice to overcome the noise.‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’He had brightened up immediately at the mention ofNewspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk ofbread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leanedacross the table so as to be able to speak without shouting. ‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’regetting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going tohave when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished withit, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, Idare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit ofit! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them,every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. TheEleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will becomeobsolete before the year 2050.’He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple ofmouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’spassion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had losttheir mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course thegreat wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundredsof nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms;there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there fora word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A wordcontains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you havea word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”?“Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exactopposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a strongerversion of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string ofvague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the restof them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” ifyou want something stronger still. Of course we use those formsalready. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothingelse. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will becovered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t yousee the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.‘s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at themention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected acertain lack of enthusiasm.‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ hesaid almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking inOldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in “TheTimes” occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations.In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all itsvagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp thebeauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak isthe only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller everyyear?’Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympatheticallyhe hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off anotherfragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and wenton:‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrowthe range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrimeliterally impossible, because there will be no words in which toexpress it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressedby exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all itssubsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in theEleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process willstill be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewerand fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a littlesmaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse forcommitting thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline,reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even forthat. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sortof mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, thatby the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being willbe alive who could understand such a conversation as we arehaving now?’‘Except ——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remarkwas not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divinedwhat he was about to say.‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050— earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will havedisappeared. The whole literature of the past will have beendestroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist onlyin Newspeak versions, not merely changed into somethingdifferent, but actually changed into something contradictory ofwhat they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change.Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like“freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has beenabolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In factthere will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxymeans not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy isunconsciousness.’One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deepconviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He seestoo clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like suchpeople. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a littlesideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on hisleft the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who wassitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemedto be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time totime Winston caught some such remark as ‘I think you’re so right,I do so agree with you’, uttered in a youthful and rather sillyfeminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant,even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight,though he knew no more about him than that he held someimportant post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of aboutthirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His headwas thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he wassitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winstontwo blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, wasthat from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it wasalmost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winstoncaught a phrase —‘complete and final elimination ofGoldsteinism’— jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in onepiece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, aquack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hearwhat the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about itsgeneral nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demandingsterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, hemight be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army,he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabarfront — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could becertain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As hewatched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down,Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human beingbut some kind of dummy.