| This thought derives from something I read in 1984. You (who know who you are) have been warned. Now that's out of the way let's start this. I recently read an amazing book called 1984. I hope that most of you have at leats heard of it before. I strongly suggest that you read it. But you may be depresed for a while afterword. Anyway, one of the main issues of this book is control over the masses. One way this is achived is by forming a new language called Newspeakc. It is constantly being revised so that it contains fewer and fewer words. For example. The word 'bad' does not exist. It is simply replaced by 'ungood'. And so you can see how much the english language can be reduced if eliminate half of all the opposites and all words that mean roughly the same thing. 'Exceptional', 'amazing' and 'excellent' can be replaced by 'plusgood', or 'doubleplusgood' if it's a really good thing. So I think you get the idea. To quote the book, you know 'how', just not 'why'. Thnik about it. If words like 'freedom' and 'revolution' are suddenly taken away would our kids be able to concive thoughts of that kind? If the govenrment took away almost all the kinds of self expression now, then our kids would never be tought them when they began to talk. So would they be able to think thoughts of revolution? Or would they simply be unhappy and except what happens, no matter how bad? Normally I would say that the thoughts would always exist but there is one special condition in this book that I didn't think of. Let's add a new variable to the equation. Let's say that the total history of the world could be rerwitten so that no negative (from the point of view of the government) examples could ever be read or refected on. I'm not really going to expand on this theory. Mainly because the whole thing is so well thought out it's hard to find and holes. I just wanted to share this and to commment on the awesome power of an extensive vocabulary. It's doubleplusgood! |