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Destruction Of Language In 1984 By George Orwell

Decent Essays

Could the destruction of language and the past be used to manipulate the population? The destruction of language and the past as demonstrated in the book 1984 by George Orwell, the people use newspeak which is a butchered version of language that is dumbed down so they can not think colorfully. It can be used as tools to manipulate the population because everyone speaks the same language, the language is minimal and bland, and if people don’t know what has happened in the past then they can not know when history is repeating itself.
First, speaking the same language would be helpful in a sense being that everyone would understand what another is saying. However, speaking the same language as everyone else there would only be one opinion as to what is right and wrong, that opinion being that of the government. …show more content…

This controls the thoughts of the people and gives the government the power to manipulate those thoughts based on whatever would best suit the situation of that government. In the book the character Ampleforth is imprisoned for allowing the word ‘God’ to stay at the end of a sentence (Orwell 230).
To go along with speaking the same language as being a bad thing, the language that is being forced is very narrow and with little to no vocabulary at all. This means that the ordinary person will have very dull and meaningless thoughts. The people wont know of colorful words they will only know the words that they have been told to know. The government weeds out words that put more thoughts into people's minds one way or another, whether its portraying those words as politically incorrect or

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