They consisted of two or more
words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily
pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a nounverb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single
example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly,
‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an
orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows: noun-verb,
GOODTHINK; past tense and past participle, GOODTHINKED;
present participle, GOOD-THINKING; adjective,
GOODTHINKFUL; adverb, GOODTHINKWISE; verbal noun,
GOODTHINKER.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan.
The words of which they were made up could be any parts of
speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way
which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their
derivation. In the word CRIMETHINK (thoughtcrime), for
instance, the THINK came second, whereas in THINKPOL
(Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word POLICE had
lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing
euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary
than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of MINITRUE, MINIPAX, and MINILUV were, respectively,
MINITRUTHFUL, MINIPEACEFUL, and MINILOVELY, simply
because — TRUEFUL, -PAXFUL, and — LOVEFUL were slightly
awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could
inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely
intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a
whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a
‘Times’ leading article as OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL
INGSOC. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in
Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whose ideas were formed before the
Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the
principles of English Socialism.’ But this is not an adequate
translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the
Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear
idea of what is meant by INGSOC. And in addition, only a person
thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of
the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK,
which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and
decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of
which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings
as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had
had their meanings extended until they contained within
themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were
sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be
scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers
of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but,
having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make
sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
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
meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as
HONOUR, JUSTICE, MORALITY, INTERNATIONALISM,
DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, and RELIGION had simply ceased to
exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them,
abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts
of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single
word CRIMETHINK, while all words grouping themselves round
the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the
single word OLDTHINK. Greater precision would have been
dangerous. What was required in a Party member was 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’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal,
Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew
about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the
commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with
other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the
same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct,
and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of
departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was
entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual
immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all
sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery,
homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal
intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to
enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary,
which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be
necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations,
but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was
meant by GOODSEX— that is to say, normal intercourse between
man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and
without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was
SEXCRIME. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a
heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical:
beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great
many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP
(forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry
of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to
mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and
contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society.
An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy
entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to
the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the
connotation ‘good’ when applied to the Party and ‘bad’ when
applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of
words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and
which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but
from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might
have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B
vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or
doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was
invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily
pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for
example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith
worked, was called RECDEP, the Fiction Department was called
FICDEP, the Teleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP,
and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time.
Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped
words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of
political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use
abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian
countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such
words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR,
AGITPROP. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it
were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious
purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one
narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the
associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words
COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up a composite
picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl
Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word COMINTERN, on the
other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a welldefined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily
recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table.
COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking
thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over
which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same
way, the associations called up by a word like MINITRUE are fewer
and more controllable than those called up by MINISTRY OF
TRUTH. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating
whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that
was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other
than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always
sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since
what was required, above all for political purposes, was short
clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered
rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s
mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the
fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably
these words — GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED,
SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC, BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and
countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the
stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last.
The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once
staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at.
The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any
subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent
of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt
necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a
Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement
should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically
as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to
do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and
the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain
wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc,
assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from.
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
higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the
Newspeak word DUCKSPEAK, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like
various other words in the B vocabulary, DUCKSPEAK was
ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were
quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and
when ‘The Times’ referred to one of the orators of the Party as a
DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and
valued compliment.
THE C VOCABULARY. The C vocabulary was supplementary to
the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms.
These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were
constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to
define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They
followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two
vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in
everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or
technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to
his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of
the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were
common to all lists, and 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.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak
the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was
well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been
possible, for example, to say BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD. But this
statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a selfevident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned
argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas
inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless
form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped
together and condemned whole groups of heresies without
defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak
for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the
words back into Oldspeak. For example, ALL MANS ARE EQUAL
was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in
which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak
sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a
palpable untruth — i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or
strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and
this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the
word EQUAL. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means
of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using
Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In
practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in
DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within a couple of
generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have
vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language
would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary
meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that FREE had once meant
‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never
heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings
attaching to QUEEN and ROOK. There would be many crimes and
errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing
characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more
pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings
more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper
uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last
link with the past would have been severed. History had already
been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived
here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained
one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the
future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be
unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate
any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to
some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or
was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak
expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book
written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological
translation — that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take
for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of
Independence:
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED
BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS,
THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT
OF HAPPINESS. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS,
GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING
THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES
DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW
GOVERNMENT . . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into
Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest
one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage
up in the single word CRIMETHINK. A full translation could only
be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be
changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already
being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it
desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures,
while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with
the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare,
Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in
process of translation: when the task had been completed, their
original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the
past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and
difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be
finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first
century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature — indispensable technical manuals, and the like — that
had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow
time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption
of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.