The Trump administration’s “Seven Forbidden Words”
NOVANEWS
By Lawrence Davidson
On the uses of censorship
There is a scene in George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984, where the protagonist, Winston Smith, is having a conversation with a philologist by the name of Syme. Syme is involved in a government effort to restructure the language spoken by the novel’s upper classes, those who have power or work for the ruling party. The language is called “Newspeak”. Syme’s job is to get rid of dangerous words. Here is how he describes his task:
We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day… The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime [having unorthodox thoughts] literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
Now let’s shift to another s...