Word: newspeak
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Alternative futures call for alternative language. “1984” had Newspeak, “A Clockwork Orange” had Nadsat—each distorted, disorienting vocabulary a warning of possible ills. In “The Year of the Flood,” her most recent novel and the second in a series of three, Margaret Atwood similarly invents a dictionary for her post-apocalyptic world. But her words are amusing than ominous—the lexicon for a dystopian vision at once entertaining and insubstantial. Atwood’s way with words should come...
...caricatures have defined the international view of Chinese journalists. The first is that of the Orwellian mouthpiece - the unquestioning apparatchik feeding the cowed masses their daily dose of newspeak. The second is that of the dissident author, imprisoned, beaten and tortured for railing against corruption and human-rights abuses, or forced into lonely exile and doomed forevermore to wander the Western lecture circuit...
...what can mundane writings, like personal notes on "a violent dust-storm" in the afternoon of Oct. 9, 1938, or the purple color of ripe olives at a Moroccan market tell us about the man who brought us the chilling phrases Big Brother, newspeak and doublethink...
...Flash forward two months, and the national debate has finally caught up with political reality. It now focuses on the end of the Iraq conflict - on "timetables," "timelines" or, in the Orwellian Newspeak of the White House, "joint aspirational time horizons." Whatever the language and whatever translations are used, the conversation is changing. Both the White House and the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, now publicly talk about temporal goals. Last week al-Maliki even declared a preference for Obama's 16-month redeployment plan - though his spokesman subsequently issued a vague, none-too-convincing clarification stating that...
...first see Worner - where else? - presiding over his group of toadying yes-men in a boardroom. He sports a puppet on top of his head as some sort of crazed motivational device. "What is the half-life of your innovation?" he screams, in a perfect parody of corporate newspeak. Hart's musical ear for creating nonsense versions of the aerobicized cynicism of biz language becomes one of the book's biggest pleasures. When Worner later runs into a disguised Hutch spewing stream of consciousness poetry he thinks he's finally found someone who's "not afraid to be an idiot...