And how, exactly, do you claim to know what Orwell would have called bin Laden? "Politics and the English Language" is oft cited, but a bit dry and grammatically proscriptive; I don't know if it actually says anything about this kind of usage. And I wasn't "policing language" here, I was arguing about usage of Orwell.
I wouldn't even object to labeling Bin Laden that way, but the label is usually applied much more broadly. I'd guess, offhand, that Orwell would have called Bin Laden a religious fanatic, and would not have chosen to invent some euphonious neologism. In support of that guess, from the Appendix of 1984, readable at eng.buffalo.edu
The B vocabulary.
The B vocabulary consisted of
words which had been deliberately constructed for political
purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every
case a political implication, but were intended to impose a
desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a
full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult
to use these words correctly. In some cases they couId be
translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A
vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and
always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were
a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas
into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and
forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words.
They consisted of two or more words,
or portions of words, welded together in an easily
pronounceable form. . . .
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or
might have political significance of any kind was fitted into
the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of
people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public
building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that
is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of
syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the
Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in
which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the
Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes
Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not
done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early
decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases
had been one of the characteristic features of political
language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use
abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian
countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such
words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comin- tern, Inprecorr,
Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as
it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a
conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a
name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting
out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
The words Communist International, for instance, call up
a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags,
barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word
Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a
tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine.
It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as
limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is
a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought,
whereas Communist International is a phrase over which
one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way,
the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are
fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry
of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of
abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost
exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily
pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other
than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always
sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so,
since what was required, above all for political purposes, was
short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be
uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the
speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in
force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much
alike. Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax,
prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel,
thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or
three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between
the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a
gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And
this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make
speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically
neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or
sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party
member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement
should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as
automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His
training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost
foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their
harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord
with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. |
