NEW SPK?

A Question For Our Evolving Language

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Disclaimer at the bottom.

Ingsoc. Plusgood. Newspeak. If you recognize these words, you'll know I'm referring to George Orwell's famous thought provoking novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this book, Orwell threads social commentary tightly with a grim prediction of the future - a brutal police state where the government has full control over every aspect of everyone's daily lives. Many of the novel's features and themes, ranging from mass surveillance through everyday electronics, to the manipulation of public thought and perpetual war, bear an uncanny resemblance to the present we now inherit.

But perhaps one of the most intriguing features in the novel is Newspeak. Orwell describes Newspeak as a sort of 'destruction of language'. As it's employed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak essentially serves to make all and any other thoughts impossible. This form of 'thought control' leaves the speakers of this new language powerless to properly express themselves. In the dark future of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the general populace (referred to in the novel dubiously as 'proletariat') has been seized of possessing any critical thought.

Newspeak typically consists of the combination of prefixes and adjectives. For example, if one might say super or amazing, the translation to Newspeak would read as plusgood or doubleplusgood. This simple trick renders all other colorful or poetic adjectives (excellent, splendid, epic, awesome, etc) obsolete. With the right prefixes, you can also remove all negatives. You won't need bad if you have ungood, and this doubly takes away all other negatives too (terrible, awful, dreadful, poor, etc).

The scariest aspect of this concept lies in how accurate a prediction it became for things like 'MSNglish', or '13375P34K'. While these specific examples may not necessarily be maniacal scheming of government control, it can not be refuted that there has been a wide-spread 'dumbing down' of the English language in latent years [Personally, I cringe every time I see 'its' misused in ads, or careless abuse of 's for pluralization - but that's just me].

It could be argued, however, that these recent changes in language and slang are not necessarily a bad thing. After all, they could just be the logical evolutionary forms of the English language itself. It seems that eventually, all language should break down into simple words. Shorter words and a more streamlined selection of words could yield economic rewards in terms of time spent writing/typing or conversation. The plausibility is there folks.

So here it is - the cream filling. I caught myself wondering recently if anyone else has played around with the idea of shortening words with different protocols or rules. Maybe no one has time for it. But I got to thinking about forming words into three-letter combinations, wherever possible, and removing vowels for longer words.

Let's go with a classic ;

The quick brown fox jumped over the two lazy dogs.

And now let's butcher it ;

THE QUK BRN FOX JMPD OVR THE TWO LZY DGS.

You might have noticed 'JMPD' has four letters - but this is because one would probably turn 'Jump' into 'JMP'. You could probably get away with 'JPD' - but there are probably other words that could be misplaced there.

'QUK' is an interesting one because, because it's hard to assume there's an I in there. 'QIK' might have worked better - thus you would probably end up with 'QAK' as well. Note a similar issue with 'BRN' - is it 'Burn'? 'Brown'? 'Born'? We may never know.

Turning this to 11, you can dome some real nasty stuff with it.

TAK THS PRGRPH FOR INSTNC. YOU CAN PRBLY MAK OUT XCTLY WAT IM TRYNG TO SAY RYT NOW. OBVSLY IT DSNT WRK IN ALL CASES [herp]. BUT YOU CAN STL RMV HLF THE LTRS YUD NED NRMLY.

I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that this eye melting abomination will catch on - it won't. But I began to wonder, as I always do, if anyone else had toyed with this idea? And what are their thoughts on the idea of Language and the way it is growing? Have we already gone too far? Has technology helped throw us past a point of no return? Or will our emotional attachment to poetry and beautiful wording triumph over the logical 'slimming' of the language ecosystem? In a sense, ONL TIM WIL TEL ;).

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Disclaimer

While I can't help but find the aforementioned Newspeak 'incredibly intriguing', I am no advocate for shortening or removing language. I am very pro expression, and love literature a little too much to really commit to seeing it fade.

This is also my first post! And although I haven't posted anything since joining steem, I do have other works planned ahead - I just have to get them down on paper. If you enjoyed this post, I'm happy to tell you that many of these future projects will be in the same vein! And I'll be focusing on different philosophical/moral ideas, and breakdowns of movies and TV shows.

Thanks for reading!