1984 - Planet eBook

simply because -TRUEFUL, -PAXFUL, and -LOVEFULwere slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however,all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly thesame way.Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings,barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered thelanguage as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typicalsentence from a ‘Times’ leading article as OLDTHINKERSUNBELLYFEEL INGSOC. The shortest rendering that onecould make of this in Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whoseideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a fullemotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.’But this is not an adequate translation. To beginwith, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeaksentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear ideaof what is meant by INGSOC. And in addition, only a personthoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate thefull force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind,enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of theword OLDTHINK, which was inextricably mixed up withthe idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special functionof certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINKwas one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroythem. These words, necessarily few in number, hadhad their meanings extended until they contained withinthemselves whole batteries of words which, as they weresufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, couldnow be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facingthe compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to