Journal #1: 1984

When I first got my cell phone, my dad told me that I wasn't allowed to text on it. When I asked him why, among several other reasons, he said that people who text don't even spell properly or use good grammar. I thought at first that this was silly. How could shortening words be such a problem? I didn't usually do it because I thought it looked dumb (using the letter "u" for the word "you" or "r" for "are"). However, as I thought about it more, I wondered how close humans actually are from writing and speaking in the most lazy fashion available.

We are, essentially, extremely lazy and will always want to perform tasks in the easiest way. I began to wonder how long it would be before students would be allowed to write in that way. How long would it be before children in elementary school wouldn't even know what real grammar was? Would people in the future, if they read this even be able to understand it?

The fear that began forming in my mind, and that was my dad's, became real when I read it in print. " 'Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.' " (pg. 55), is how one character describes Newspeak and its goals. How similar are these goals to that of a lazy teenager, or even an adult for that matter?

Even beyond taking away many words in the English language, Newspeak also seeks to take away the freedom of thought that comes with having so many options to express one feeling. Human beings are so complex and therefore have complex emotions. We have worked on and honed our dictionary as best we can in order to describe those emotions. To see hundreds of years of work and development wiped away all in the name of simplicity is not only frightening but sickening as well. What better way is there to control us than to give us a limited number of ways to describe our emotions? When the ways of describing our feelings are inhibited, our thoughts will be as well. Without the development of expression, how will we grow? How will we overcome and move on? This is what the government that George Orwell describes seeks to create. The ultimate control over people is when you can control their thoughts. People always consider their minds as safe havens, even when the world around them is not. How scary is it to think that this may no longer be true in the near future?