Showing posts with label Syme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syme. Show all posts

Monday, April 22, 2013

It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words.  Of course the great wasteafe is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.  It isn't only the synonyms; there are also antonyms.  After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word?  A word contains its opposite in itself.  Take "good" for instance.  If you have a word like "good" what need is there for a word like "bad?" "Ungood" will do just as well - better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.  Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good," what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning or "doubleplussgood" if you want something stronger still.  Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else.  In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality only one word.  Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?

-Syme (George Orwell)