Word: doublethink
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gold is hardly shocked. He is no stranger to doublethink. A literary hustler whose interest in Government is a sham, he does not even vote, a fact "he could not disclose publicly without bringing blemish to the image he had constructed for himself as a radical moderate...
Simon attacks not only players and plays but also fellow critics. This fall he accused the New York Times's Richard Eder of such "tergiversation, equivocation, doublethink and simultaneous talking out of both corners of his mouth as took his predecessor, Clive Barnes [now at the New York Post], years of painstaking practice to master." Colleagues are quick to pan Simon in return: "The Count Dracula of critics!" (Andrew Sarris, the Village Voice); "The Transylvanian vampire!" (Robert Brustein. Yale Drama School); "Personally offensive!" (Brendan Gill, The New Yorker). Many of Simon's critics, however, would not dispute...
...going to the front. One could only cross out phrases, nothing could be added. A soldier in the hospital had the choice of crossing out "sick/wounded" and "am going on well/hope to be discharged soon." The recipient was protected from war realities, experience was reduced to a choice of doublethink phrases. Forms, of course, stuck with...
...remember him solely for this final volume is like recalling a life by its terminal illness. Indeed when he wrote 1984, Orwell was in the last throes of tuberculosis. The book's pervasive slogan, "Big Brother Is Watching You"; the portmanteau words "New-speak," "bellyfeel," "doublethink"; the inverted graffiti, "Freedom Is Slavery," "Ignorance Is Strength"-all these may be indelible. Nonetheless, if some of 1984's predictions have come true, most have not. If the book lives, it is more as a warning than as prophecy...
...aware of the shabbiness, the flabbiness of the party lie. Among themselves they ridicule it. And then cynically, in the same breath, in angry protests and articles, ringingly and rhetorically repeat the very same lie, reinforcing it by their pseudo eloquence and style! Where did [George] Orwell discover his doublethink, what was his model if not the Soviet intelligentsia of the '30s and '40s? And since that time, this doublethink has been worked to perfection and become a perennial, vitally important device...