Manipulation of Language

Current day comparison to Orwell's 1984 - Part 1

In his treatise Politics and the English Language¹, Orwell argued that even in 1946 the English language was ‘in a bad way’. He further asserts that the ongoing decline of language has undeniable political and economic causes. Orwell cites several issues as examples, including a lack of precision, ever-changing and forgotten terminology causing the meaning of words and phrases to become vague or lost entirely, and the overuse of jargonistic, meaningless or superfluous words. He describes these issues which are frequently seen in the prose of both common man and academic, as swindles and perversions that make language slovenly, vague and deceitful.

Importantly, Orwell makes a special distinction for political writing which due to its constant adherence to ‘party line’ and prevailing orthodoxy, he found to be lifeless, repetitive, unengaging and almost always delivered in an unfailingly robotic manner. He asserts that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind (Orwell, 1946). These issues, coupled with his observations of Nazi and Stalin-era political propaganda, led Orwell to explore the development and implications of political language in Nineteen-Eighty Four. In his book, much of the government’s effort in developing their controlled language known as Newspeak is intended to control the speech and thoughts of individual people and through this control, to limit wrong thinking; which Orwell describes as thoughtcrime. Orwell’s Newspeak simplifies and restricts the vocabulary to deliberately limit an individual person’s ability to think critically and articulate dissenting concepts. Further, Newspeak intentionally makes self-expression difficult, constraining as distasteful all discussion of free will or independence. It does this by limiting the number of available words², and in some cases by giving words differing meanings depending on who it is that is speaking. Orwell’s government promulgates Newspeak ostensibly to produce clarity, while intentionally constraining all colour of thought and expression.

While language naturally changes over time³, in recent years we have seen increasing effort focused by individuals and groups on identifying, labelling and then manipulating the meaning of words to suit particular politically motivated narratives. Of these, none are more overt than proponents of the equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI/DEI) movement which intentionally seeks to limit what they believe to be our inherent heterodox thinking⁴. Proponents have invested heavily to construct and promote the nebulous concept hate speech such that, should the individual wish it, hate speech can now encompass some or all what had previously been described as: (i) offensive, violent, and discriminatory speech or gestures that in many jurisdictions already enjoyed legislative protection; (ii) expressions of animosity, disparaging comments, ridicule or sarcasm; and (iii) offensive language and terms that have often passed into the common vernacular as swears, and which another person may claim to find hurtful (Jay, 2023). The latter two groups are often collectively mocked as hurty words. During the last two years this Newspeak term hate speech has become enshrined in legislation and, sans definition, features in the online safety legislation of both Australia and the UK. The absence of a concrete definition in these Acts may suggest legislators intend hate speech as a movable feast - a malleable concept that can be shaped at will to suit ever changing social moirés and, where activists, courts or the police might wish it, perhaps even the circumstances of any particular situation.

While examples of language manipulation are numerous and many are included in Professor Peter Boghossian’s YouTube series Woke in Plain English⁵, none better demonstrates the confused and misguided attempts to simultaneously construct and suppress language that some disingenuously call hate speech quite like the now infamous Stanford University Harmful Language List⁶. For a short time anyone could download the 13-page document from the now shuttered Stanford IT website that begins by presenting readers with its own self-deprecating trigger warning⁷ (D’Agostino, 2023). Even though the Stanford CIO Council and the activist group they developed and promulgated the list with intended it as a serious response to language they wanted internet users to abjure as harmful, it was frequently ridiculed and likened to poor quality parody (Cu, 2023; D’Agostino, 2023; WSJ Editorial Board, 2022). The list’s authors express goal was to eliminate this harmful language from websites and computer code, yet incongruously they state they are not attempting to assign levels of harm to those very same words included in their list. They also ask those using words in the list to consider the possible impact, or harm, these words can have. Their list includes the following examples:

(i)              seminal

They say this word reinforces male-dominated language, having arrive at this conclusion through mental gymnastics that deliberately conflates the meaning of seminal (noun), of or related to semen, with its more typical use (adjective), to describe important and influential works⁸. They encourage readers to use the words leading or groundbreaking instead.

(ii)             brave

They say this word perpetuates the stereotype of the ‘noble courageous savage’, again by conflating the meaning (noun), a young native American man, with either the more common meaning (adjective), someone who is willing to do things that are dangerous⁹, or less common (verb) to deliberately expose yourself to unpleasant or dangerous conditions¹⁰. The list’s authors offer no alternatives and say the word brave should never be used. In this way and after more than four centuries of use, if the list’s authors had their way it would simply be dropped from the English language.

(iii)            master

They say historically, masters enslaved people, didn’t consider them human and didn’t allow them to express free will. Irrespective of the actual use case, their definition is limited to the more modern use case derived from slavery and ignores its true derivation from maistre, magister, and maister - which are all middle English honorific titles for a scholar or teacher; and magnus, which is Latin for ‘greatest’. Master is yet another word the list’s authors say should generally be avoided.

Within current day politics, corporations and universities, the woke movement has a well-established foothold, pushing in all directions to shape language in much the same way as Orwell’s Newspeak in Nineteen-Eighty Four. The manipulation of language is only one piece of a much larger jigsaw that we will be exploring together. That jigsaw incorporates pieces that include the use of never-ending conflict and manipulation of the news stories being broadcast to us. The reason I have started with language is because it is the basis for all of the other pieces of the puzzle; language is the way by which people communicate with one another, build relationships, and create a sense of community.

Finally, as Orwell suggested this destruction of language is intentionally limiting our ability to communicate thoughts and ideas with each other. It is creating an environment where the small group in control of our language can manipulate and control the thoughts and actions of everyone else. While some argue that rather than politicians or government it is the print and broadcast media, internet and social media causing the destruction of language¹¹; they blindly, or perhaps wilfully, ignore that it is politicians who are making the legislation that now controls the language we can use on those fora.

Part Two of my Current day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.

1. Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. The Orwell Foundation. Last accessed: October 28, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

2. Orwell describes examples including that use of a single positive term ‘good’ as the basis to describe something nice, and with the addition of anti (anti-good) to describe something bad, The Party eliminated all need for the negative word ‘bad’.   

3. What was once ‘cool’ became ‘rad’ (short for radical), ‘wicked’, ‘dope’, ‘lit’, ‘sic’ and more recently, ‘GOAT’ (greatest of all time).

4. Our current language term for Orwell’s thoughtcrime: thoughts or expression of unacceptable beliefs or opinions.

5. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s3oVlhI9p4L1WGZNV4dLIG

6. https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf

7. On opening the document, the reader is presented with the following warning: This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.

8. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/seminal

9. While the word brave is late 15^th century Franco-English, it is of Latin (barbarus), Italian (bravo - meaning bold) and Spanish (bravo - meaning courageous, untamed or savage) derivation.

10. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/brave

11. https://theessentialencounter.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/the-destruction-of-language-in-george-orwells-1984/