Teaching Newspeak

I've always marvelled at George Orwell's prescient warnings. His idea that when you remove words from the language you remove the very means of thought was a theory that I found especially frightening. Orwell:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

From the Telegraph:

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

Let this be absolute proof that the politically correct, socialist, anti-Christian intellectuals that run Western education have a clear agenda: like Orwell's leaders of Oceania and writers of the Newspeak dictionary, these intellectual thugs wish to destroy our history and shape thought to match theirs. This has nothing to do with a "multifaith society." If that were the case, "mullah," "rabbi," and "bishop" would find a home in their books. Instead, "bishop" must go.

The thug that runs the children's dictionaries is named Vineeta Gupta. Her bogus reason for removing words like aisle, minister, and saint is that kids have little hands and not every word in the language can be included in the dictionaries. True enough. But look at some of the words finding a home in her children's dictionaries: celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro.

Nice selection. Get 'em while they're young and teach the kiddies to start thinking interdependently about cautionary tales involving a bilingual dyslexic hoping to gain citizenship in the EU while bungee jumping over an endangered owl farm donated by a creep from Oxford University Press who avoided conflict by consulting a compulsory committee.

Yes, that is better than teaching words like ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, and lobster, all of which are creatures that have disappeared from the pages of the children's dictionary. And who needs them, anyway, when the big city is the place to be? Those weird creatures from a bygone era and distant planet are joined by insensitive words like sin, nun, devil, monarch, and decade.

"Decade" sticks out like a sore thumb, dovetailing nicely with the newly added word "chronological." Removing the specific "decade" but replacing it with the abstract "chronological" is interesting. I wonder what that's about? If I were to get heavy-duty-Orwell on you, I might theorize that the PC crowd is going to start playing with time as well as words. Orwell: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

I have a phrase for Ms. Gupta. It might not belong in a children's dictionary, but she can find it between her recently deleted words "fern" and "fungus."