I’ll also go on another Orwell tangent: Conservatives love calling any new “woke” word that enters common usage as “Orwellian”, because they don’t want to be “forced” by social pressure to learn new terminology important to people whose humanity they refuse to acknowledge anyway

But Newspeak is a version of English where descriptive words have been removed, not added. 1984 is written with a deeply limited vocabulary set.......so in fact, conservatives share an ideology with *the villains* of 1984.

Newspeak is not called that because the words are new. It’s called that because that’s *exactly* what authoritarian fascists would call a restrictive language set, it’s propaganda. The state in the book came up with the name, and that context is important

It’s “Newspeak” for the same reason they’re “National Socialists”, an intentional misnomer intended to obscure reality, to wear down your defences. Fascists don’t call a spade a spade, they point at a cloudy sky and say “it is sunny”, until you’re tired of arguing with them.

Fascists may claim to value free speech, but they jump at the chance to censor specific words, and it’s not the words they themselves would use. That’s why they hate obscenities and any kind of terminology related to social justice, but not slurs.

The fucking fundamental point of 1984 is that you can more effectively curtail freedom of speech by obliterating the words you need to form and communicate complex ideas, than you would by simply making certain expressions seditious, because complexity is anathema to fascism

If I don’t have the word “genderqueer” in my vocabulary, I can’t be my entire self, that is a thing I struggled with for decades, and it was only in having that word that I was able to exist in an authentic way.

That’s literally why fascists protest having to learn new words.

So cast your mind back to “grab them by the pussy”

The left was offended because he advocated sexual assault, with the meaning and not the words themselves.

The right insisted we were offended by the word “pussy”, that “better” words would make the meaning more palatable.

I can’t think of a better illustration to keep in the back of your head any time you read or hear a statement being issued by a fascist:

Ignore the words themselves, interrogate what they MEAN, because they meticulously choose words to intentionally obscure meaning.

That’s counter intuitive if you’re someone who puts a lot of thought and effort into word choice because you want to accurately communicate what you genuinely think and believe, but I swear it is the decoder ring for nazi-speak.