{"title":"Orwellian Doublespeak: Dialogicality and the English Language","authors":"T. Beavitt","doi":"10.15826/csp.2021.5.4.158","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The English writer George Orwell is often credited with uncannily accurate prophetic powers, so much so that the adjective “Orwellian” may (ironically) refer to that predicted dystopian future through which we are presently living (McKenna, 2019). Various terms drawn from Orwell’s novel “1984”—including “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “unperson” and “thoughtcrime”—have also entered the popular lexicon. But perhaps the most striking illustration of the political tendency to abuse language appears in the incongruous fictitious slogan WAR IS PEACE. SLAVERY IS FREEDOM. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. In his famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language (Orwell, 1946), which has since become a “required text” (Pinsker, 1997) in the essay canon (Bloom, 1999), Orwell asserts that “all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia”. To his list of contemporaneous terms that suffer from political “abuse”1, he adduces the term “science”. It is interesting to consider what Orwell would have made of the common present-day usage of this word that employs the definite article (“the science”), often prefaced with imperative verbs such as “trust”, “listen to” or “believe in”2, to imply something that is established as beyond appropriate criticism. In a previous work, we examined the extent to which English functions as an “interlingua” to facilitate scientific communication, as well as some senses in which it can be criticised as promoting linguistic imperialism (Popova & Beavitt, 2017). In subsequent works, we considered three sociological aspects of the phenomenon of science (Popova et al., 2018) and discussed usages of the English article system from the perspective of Russian scientific","PeriodicalId":52087,"journal":{"name":"Changing Societies & Personalities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Changing Societies & Personalities","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2021.5.4.158","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The English writer George Orwell is often credited with uncannily accurate prophetic powers, so much so that the adjective “Orwellian” may (ironically) refer to that predicted dystopian future through which we are presently living (McKenna, 2019). Various terms drawn from Orwell’s novel “1984”—including “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “unperson” and “thoughtcrime”—have also entered the popular lexicon. But perhaps the most striking illustration of the political tendency to abuse language appears in the incongruous fictitious slogan WAR IS PEACE. SLAVERY IS FREEDOM. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. In his famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language (Orwell, 1946), which has since become a “required text” (Pinsker, 1997) in the essay canon (Bloom, 1999), Orwell asserts that “all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia”. To his list of contemporaneous terms that suffer from political “abuse”1, he adduces the term “science”. It is interesting to consider what Orwell would have made of the common present-day usage of this word that employs the definite article (“the science”), often prefaced with imperative verbs such as “trust”, “listen to” or “believe in”2, to imply something that is established as beyond appropriate criticism. In a previous work, we examined the extent to which English functions as an “interlingua” to facilitate scientific communication, as well as some senses in which it can be criticised as promoting linguistic imperialism (Popova & Beavitt, 2017). In subsequent works, we considered three sociological aspects of the phenomenon of science (Popova et al., 2018) and discussed usages of the English article system from the perspective of Russian scientific