call it)
by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party
members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more
and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the
Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc,
but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that
when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten,
a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles
of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought
is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give
exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party
member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other
meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect
methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly
by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained
of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings
whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed
.
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