Doublespeak: Nineteen Eighty-four and George Orwell Essay

The definition of language is expressing our wants or needs to other people. Whether we realize it or not, language is a very important part of our everyday lives. Through our body language, eyes, tone or volume of our voice, words, or appearance, we can communicate occasions that we want (or sometimes not want) to other people. Unfortunately, language can sometimes be confusing and open to misinterpretation. One instance of this is doublespeak, a vague type of speaking that deliberately shields the means of the word, or making the word nicer without ruining its true meaning. Wherever doublespeak is employ, ignorance and chaos is sure to follow. Doublespeak is often habitd by people in power such as senators, presidents, CEOs, and prime ministers. Typically, the speaker may use more complex words which the general public might not know the meaning of. It pret destinations to communicate, when in reality it leaves the intended audience with little to no idea of what was said and t he public becomes ignorant.The term was shake up by George Orwells dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a totalistic origination where the public has become limited to the thoughts of serving The Party, and only The Party. It has become so restricted to the spot where a new language has been created in order to stifle the thoughts of its people. This language, Newspeak, is a diminutive version of the position language generated to prevent its oblivious nation with coming up with such foreign concepts as freedom, love, and resistance. The govern of Airstrip One is plagued by never ending war, constant surveillance by a organism called Big Brother, which is never clear if he actually existed or just a symbol to flirt The Party. The Party also used excessive amounts of doublespeak.For example, at one point, the protagonist Winston re particles the chocolate ration to be forty-three grams a week, only to hear the woman on the newsreel inform h im that chocolate rations had gone up to twenty-three grams. While this novel is a bit more extreme, there are many similarities to the world that George Orwell created, and our own, the most notable being the excessive amount of doublespeak. William Lutz uses multiple examples of doublespeak used in real spiritedness in his essay The World of Doublespeak. He describes an incident in 1978 where an airplane had crashed in Pensacola, Florida, airport where 21 people got injured and three people died.The plane was also destroyed in the incident. Because the planes insured value was better than the book value, National Airlines received a tax insurance wellbeing of 1.7 million dollars on the accident. Later in their annual report, they claimed that the 1.7 million dollars was due to an involuntary conversion of a seven-twenty-seven, which explained the capital effectively without even mentioning the deaths of the three people or the crash in general (Lutz, 179). He also mentions tha t the U.S. navy didnt pay $2,043 apiece for steel nuts it paid all that money for hexiform rotatable surface compression units and that the U.S. Air Force paid $214 apiece for Emergency Exit Lights, or flashlights.Both examples use complex words. While the authors of each example might be trying to mollify each statement with the greatest intentions, they both come off stale. In his essay Politics, Propaganda, And Doublespeak, George Orwell states people who release in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning- they dis equivalent one thing and want to express solidarity with another- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, willing ask himself at least quadruple questions, thus What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more Could I put it more shortly? H ave I said anything that is avoidably ugly? (Orwell, 170)If the authors of the examples had asked themselves such, what they were trying to say might have been a bit clearer to the average member of the public. Sadly, the authors probably did not have these intentions in mind, for this type of doublespeak is purposely meant to mislead. This is the same type of doublespeak that keeps people ignorant, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some aspects of the novel are already upon us. Doublespeak can intentionally and successfully snitch the general public with its vague tendencies. If it continues to be used in excess, we can very possibly end up with a world very similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four- full of chaos and ignorance. Doublespeak is a defile of language and abuse of communication by those who are in control, and it must be eliminated.