Newspeak and Twitter

Hi everyone! I'm currently reading 'Totalitarian Language-Orwell's Newspeak and its nazi and commnist antecedents.' The author, John Wesley is interrogating what happened to language manipulations after second world warand also wonders if not certain principles were involuntarily adopted by the contemporary world.

How much does language in today's world affect what we are able to conceive? I am thinking about this a lot--for example the absence of certain words in other languages. There are annecdotes of native american tribes which don't have a word for killing. Another idea is the movie 'the invention of lying.' But seriously, if we are never introduced to a 'thought', how likely is it that we are able to conceive of it?

Anyways, there are so many thoughts to explore--so I'm curious how you experience language today-do you think the absence of words would indeed eliminate the existence of the thought? I.e. had I never learned about sex from my environment would I have naturally discovered it?

How do facebook statuses and twitter affect the way we conceive language?

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Originally Posted by eleanora

Hi everyone! I'm currently reading 'Totalitarian Language-Orwell's Newspeak and its nazi and commnist antecedents.' The author, John Wesley is interrogating what happened to language manipulations after second world warand also wonders if not certain principles were involuntarily adopted by the contemporary world.

How much does language in today's world affect what we are able to conceive? I am thinking about this a lot--for example the absence of certain words in other languages. There are annecdotes of native american tribes which don't have a word for killing. Another idea is the movie 'the invention of lying.' But seriously, if we are never introduced to a 'thought', how likely is it that we are able to conceive of it?

Anyways, there are so many thoughts to explore--so I'm curious how you experience language today-do you think the absence of words would indeed eliminate the existence of the thought? I.e. had I never learned about sex from my environment would I have naturally discovered it?

How do facebook statuses and twitter affect the way we conceive language?

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Some language used on facebook or twitter or even text speak. I think lazy write and speech.

Native American tribes that do not used words such killing then do you used instead. eg When slaughter a animal?

i think there is a lot to this argument. but the fact of the matter is we are still able to access all those old ideas and even are free to formulate new ones. I own an "unabridged" dictionary and it is huge. I sometimes browse it freely and learn new things with it all the time. Though there is a trend towards newspeak, it is just a trend and a sort of fad. And the fact that is not enforced but voluntary, well, though better than is still sort of pathetic.

Twitter and Facebook " speak " is not as closely related to newspeak as you think, that is only the result of people being lazy in their writing. The main goal of news speak is to slowly systematically take away words from the people that are anti government. In the end leaving only positive remarks about big brother.