this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
63 points (82.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
865 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My understanding was it was a conceptually-poor language that artificially constrained one's cognitive faculties through the nexus of a limited language/vocabulary emphasizing economy of expression. Sort of like a programming language with very few keywords and only ones that were absolutely necessary to receive and nominally participate in a minimal discourse.
Edit: I think this is actually Newspeak I'm contemplating as opposed to doublespeak. Doublespeak seems to refer to intentionally ambiguous language that obfuscates meaning and emotional content and usually for a political purpose. Like calling unintentional war victims "collateral damage" to reduce the bad publicity from one's war efforts. The wrongfully-dead victims are hidden behind what sounds like oblique accounting or financial jargon.
Are you thinking of newspeak?
Whoops, lol. Is he talking about, like, George Bush or something. I'm so lost right now and he hasn't provided a single example to work from
If you haven't, take some time to read 1984. It's a fairly easy read and this thread will make a lot more sense. Also, there's a reason it's a timeless classic and referred to so often - Orwell hit on a lot of prevalent themes authoritarians like to use. Once you know how to identify them, it's easy to see when someone is using something like double speak (consciously or subconsciously)
I've read it and seen the movie, just been a while and OP wasn't super helpful pinpointing what he was after
well the two aren't necessarily exclusive. A speech pattern that obfuscates has many uses. But I think you're conflating doublespeech and doublethink a bit.
(Fun fact: the term Doublespeak / speech is never actually used in 1984. Like, at all. It gets thrown in because of the doublethink concept, and the fact that everyone weaselwords, but it's not actually used in the book.)