Orwellian Doublespeak: Dialogicality and the English Language

IF 0.4 Q4 SOCIOLOGY Changing Societies & Personalities Pub Date : 2021-12-30 DOI:10.15826/csp.2021.5.4.158
T. Beavitt
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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
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奥威尔双关语:对话性与英语
英国作家乔治·奥威尔经常被认为具有惊人的准确预言能力,以至于形容词“奥威尔式”可能(具有讽刺意味)指的是我们目前生活的反乌托邦未来(McKenna,2019)。从奥威尔的小说《1984》中提取的各种术语——包括“老大哥”、“思想警察”、“两分钟仇恨”、“101房间”、“记忆洞”、“新闻峰”、“双重思维”、“未被说服”和“思想犯罪”——也进入了流行词汇。但滥用语言的政治倾向最引人注目的例证可能出现在不协调的虚构口号“战争就是和平”中。奴隶制就是自由。无知就是力量。奥威尔在他1946年的著名文章《政治与英语》(Orwell,1946)中断言,“所有问题都是政治问题,政治本身就是一堆谎言、回避、愚蠢、仇恨和精神分裂症”。在他列出的遭受政治“滥用”的同时代术语1中,他引用了“科学”一词。有趣的是,奥威尔会如何看待这个词在当今的常见用法,该词使用定冠词(“the science”),通常以“trust”、“listen to”或“belief in”2等祈使动词开头,以暗示一些已经被确定为超出适当批评范围的东西。在之前的一项工作中,我们研究了英语在多大程度上起到了促进科学交流的“语际语言”的作用,以及在某些意义上它可以被批评为促进语言帝国主义(Popova&Beavitt,2017)。在随后的著作中,我们考虑了科学现象的三个社会学方面(Popova et al.,2018),并从俄语科学的角度讨论了英语冠词系统的用法
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.60
自引率
20.00%
发文量
25
审稿时长
4 weeks
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