when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above
all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning
which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in
the speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from
the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably
these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc,
bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or three
syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable
and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at
once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The
intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not
ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to
make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the
correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.
His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost
foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound
and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of
Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to
our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were
constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other
languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year.
Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the
smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it w
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