Word: orwellian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...adjective Orwellian, like Kafkaesque, has come to symbolize some of the horrors of the 20th century, but most of the author's works present a less gloomy vision than does Nineteen Eighty-Four. "His essential appeal is similar to Dickens'," says Gray, who senses an underlying optimism in Orwell's political and autobiographical essays. "When Orwell exposes the cruelties of society, he's writing from the heart and passionately demanding justice...
...word. A word that surely requires alteration today has been misused since the '50s. The author's name is not a synonym for totalitarianism. It is in fact the spirit that fights the worst tendencies in politics and society by using a fundamental sense of decency-Orwellian, in the best sense of the word...
What does it stand for? That question and the imminence of the Orwellian year have galvanized a small army of professors, critics and writers, journalists, pundits, social scientists, politicians and professional doomsters; hardly anyone paid for thinking out loud seems able to resist the temptation to play with Orwell's numbers. The game began in earnest last January and could, thanks to crowded conditions, easily extend into 1985. The action takes different forms: an apparently endless round of academic seminars and symposiums, coast to coast, from Manhattan College to Stanford; a swelling stream of magazine articles ("On the Brink...
...ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE of an omnipresent Big Brother intrigued and frightened the reader of the 1940's and 1950's. Today, we casually dismiss such scenarios as fanciful tales or impossibilities. But unknown to most Americans, the Administration has proposed a sweeping plan to monitor the public activities of government officials on a scale unprecedented in our history. Last week, the Senate wisely delayed the implementation of the President's controversial directive to subject federal employees to random lie detector tests and lifelong censorship. The rule (which will now go into effect next April) would have applied to officials cleared...
Browne is among the premier singer-songwriters of his generation. But that was the '70s, and the world is a few months shy of the most dreaded year of the '80s. Browne is ready for it. Lawyers in Love is full of dark Orwellian visions, leavened by some bright comic asides and lightened by some of Browne's most danceable music. The author concedes that the title track is "pretty sarcastic and maybe a little haughty," but its weirdly resonant images ("I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon/ As vacationland for lawyers in love") give...