to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole.
Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article
as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could
make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before
the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles
of English Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin
with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted
above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And
in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate
the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was
inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the
special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was
not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words,
necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they
contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were
sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped
and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak
Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make
sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words
they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had
once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of
convenience, bu
.
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