will newspeak work

Newspeak is the new language devised in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. Its role, one which it succeeds in carrying out, is to control the minds of the population by removing words from everyday life. By removing those words, it would prevent thought about those subjects and eventually eradicate them.

If it were to be put into practice in Singapore, regarding the issue of homosexuals (e.g. removing all words related to homosexual lifestyles from the dictionary), could it work? The answer would be: it would work, but it would not be overwhelmingly successful. The argument for it working is simple. By removing the words, people will stop thinking about them and eventually they will fade from memory.

Yet this can run into problems. People have a great tendency to invent new words, phrases to convey meaning. A great example of a person who routinely did it in the past would be the great playwright Shakespeare. Alternative ways of describing things would also be used so that would be another hole that newspeak will have to plug.

But that is assuming that newspeak is never outdated. Unfortunately for language and free thought, any new words will fall prey to its own success. As each word becomes more widely used, newspeak can always remove it. If a word stays obscure, it will not gain mainstream acceptance and therefore its use is limited. It may be impossible to curtail the thoughts of every person, but newspeak will succeed in preventing homosexuals from ever voicing their views openly – thats a way to judge success or failure, depending on your viewpoint.

Of course, all of this is assuming that newspeak is vigorously policed. But that is to be assumed – after all, it is pointless to speculate the consequences of a policy that is nonfunctional from the start.

To conclude, newspeak will succeed in banishing controversial issues from most people but the most it can do to a small minority would be to suppress their freedom of speech. There would be no complete success nor would it be a dismal failure.