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 things 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 meaning of the word, or making the word nicer without ruining its true meaning. Wherever doublespeak is used, ignorance and chaos is sure to follow. Doublespeak is often used 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 pretends to communicate, when in reality it leaves the intended audience with little to no idea of what was said and the public becomes ignorant. The term was inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a totalitarian world where the public has become limited to the thoughts of serving The Party, and only The Party. It has become so restricted to the point 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 English language generated to prevent its oblivious nation with coming up with such foreign concepts as freedom, love, and resistance. The district of Airstrip One is plagued by never ending war, constant surveillance by a being called â€Å"Big Brother,† which is never clear if he actually existed or just a symbol to represent The Party. The Party also used excessive amounts of doublespeak. For example, at one point, the protagonist Winston remembers the chocolate ration to be forty-three grams a week, only to hear the woman on the newsreel inform him 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 life in his essay The World of Doublespeak. He describes an incident in 1978 where an airplane had crashed in Pensacola, Florida, airport where twenty-one people got injured and three people died. The plane was also destroyed in the incident. Because the plane’s insured value was better than the book value, National Airlines received a tax insurance benefit 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 money effectively without even mentioning the deaths of the three people or the crash in general (Lutz, 179). He also mentions that â€Å"the U.S. navy didn’t pay $2,043 apiece for steel nuts; it paid all that money for ‘hexiform rotatable surface compression units† and that â€Å"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 compose each statement with the greatest intentions, they both come off stale. In his essay Politics, Propaganda, And Doublespeak, George Orwell states â€Å"people who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning- they dislike 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, will ask himself at least four 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? Have 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 deceive 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 misuse of language and abuse of communication by those who are in control, and it must be eliminated.