A look at Orwell's Newspeak | OxfordWords blog Home > A look at Orwell’s Newspeak A look at Orwell’s Newspeak George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four astounded the literary world when it first was published in 1949, and its significance and cultural impact have only grown stronger in the years since. Orwell’s warnings against totalitarian authority and omnipresent surveillance are as relevant as ever. Beyond the familiar message that “Big Brother is always watching you,” what many readers of Orwell’s dystopian novel may remember most is the fictional language he created, called Newspeak. Newspeak is a fascinating fictional language; rather than being an entirely new language like those of many science-fiction or fantasy works, Newspeak is an altered form of regular English designed and controlled by the state in order to suppress free thought, individualism, and happiness. Orwell’s language is a study in where linguistics and psychology meet, despite Orwell having expert knowledge in neither field. A quick analysis of Newspeak reveals the ways in which Orwell’s fictional language can subtly take control of characters’ actions, their moods, and even their minds.

The rules of Newspeak The primary aim of Newspeak is to reduce the meaning of language as well as the number of words possible. To this end, Newspeak removes all synonyms and antonyms. Bad instead becomes ungood, warm becomes uncold, and so on. Notably, ungood or uncold are used and yet unbad or unhot are not; the fictional “Party” controls which antonym of a word is used (e.g. warm and hot are both antonyms of cold). By choosing which words the populace can use, The Party can choose to shift thought in a more positive or negative direction to suit their needs; ungood, for example, makes the populace feel less negative than bad would, and conversely, most associate more negative emotions with the word cold (and therefore, uncold, which actually means hot) than with the word warm. Synonyms do not exist; words like satisfying, great, or excellent, for example, would all revert merely to some form of the word good. Comparative and superlative adjectives are dispatched in a similar manner: for example, there is no word for better or best in Newspeak.

Instead, the prefix plus- or doubleplus- is added to intensify words; better becomes plusgood and best would become doubleplusgood. By reducing the number of words available, as well as reducing the intensity and emotion behind the words that people in Nineteen Eighty-Four can use, The Party is able to further suppress their population’s thought and emotions. Newspeak also has different rules when it comes to forming adverbs and certain adjectives . To create an adjective one would add the suffix –ful to a noun; for example, instead of rapid, quick, or fast, one would say speedful, and instead of sick, ill, or diseased one would say diseaseful. Similar rules create adverbs with the suffix –wise, as quickly or rapidly would become speedwise and sickly would become diseasewise. As with any language, there are some exceptions to this rule, as certain adjectives like good, soft, and strong remain in Newspeak, but this is uncommon. In this fashion, a single base word can convey any part of speech. In the same vein, tenses require a smaller number of words; in Newspeak the suffix –ed is the only way to change a word to the past tense.

For example, the irregular past tenses drank or ran would no longer exist, and in their place drinked and runned would be used. By limiting the number of ways to describe the world, The Party is able to limit the population’s very perception of the world. Newspeak goals and real-world ramifications Newspeak intended not only to force the populace to conform their thoughts and ideologies towards those of The Party, but to make it impossible to even conceive of any other point of view. For example, one character in the novel mentions that one of The Party’s most chiefly known slogans, “Freedom is Slavery,” will eventually change; for when Newspeak has reached its goals, the very idea of Freedom as defined in this fashion would be impossible for the populace even to imagine. Other Newspeak words illustrate such attempts to control thought and even the populace’s ideas about reality itself: doublethink, for example, means to hold two contradictory beliefs to be true, but without any cognitive dissonance, allowing one to be unaware of actual contradictions. The slogans of The Party, “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength,” are perfect examples of this phenomenon.

Doublethink as a concept is what allows the totalitarian party to thrive without collapsing in on itself: for example, members of The Party can commit acts they know to be immoral while accepting the idea that no act they commit could possibly be immoral. Since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, some of Orwell’s Newspeak words (and other terms from the novel) have entered general use. The term big brother is synonymous with any sort of figure or organization with heavy surveillance, and has become a very common phrase in the English language. The word doublethink has also enjoyed some measure of popularity, with its definition matching its meaning from the book, a case of life imitating art when you consider that the English language (called Oldspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four) previously had few if any words that matched the meaning of doublethink. Another Newspeak term from Nineteen Eighty-Four that has gone on to enter the popular vernacular is thoughtcrime , a word used in the novel to describe the act of thinking socially unacceptable thoughts or holding opinions that are ideologically distinct from The Party’s. This word has its origins in a Japanese term ; however, Orwell’s novel popularized the term.

Thought police , the term for the group in Nineteen Eighty-Four that monitored the populace for any signs of unorthodox thought or action, has also become popular to signify any organization that attempts to suppress freedom of thought. Like thoughtcrime, thought police has its origins in the Japanese language; the thought police (known officially as the “Special Higher Police”) were a force in pre-war Japan that suppressed ideologies inconsistent with that of the government. The familiarity of Newspeak words and concepts in English is a testament to the effectiveness and ingenuity of Orwell’s fictional language, and demonstrates that it is more than a mere experiment in linguistics and psychology. The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press. Author Jason Rubenfire is an intern working for Oxford Dictionaries. Published Quotes From George Orwells Novel 1984 Quotes From George Orwells Novel 1984 1984 Quotes, Famous 1984 Quotes, 1984 Sayings Quotations... 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Part 1, Chapter 4.

Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thoght? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. 1984 Book 1, Chapter 5 Quotes Page 1 Winston Smith Quote 1 "It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them?

‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course," he added as an afterthought. (1.5.23, Syme) By curtailing frivolous and "fighting" words, the Party seeks to narrow the range of thought altogether, such that eventually, thoughtcrime will be literally impossible. Winston Smith Quote 2 "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." (1.5.23, Syme) By curtailing frivolous and "fighting" words, the Party seeks to narrow the range of thought altogether, such that eventually thoughtcrime will be literally impossible. The same goes for disruptive or subversive behavior. Winston Smith Quote 3 "By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." (1.5.30, Syme) The Party, in controlling and manipulating language, seeks to ultimately make thinking innately pure – void of rebellious concepts. Urban Dictionary: newspeak Newspeak Contrived language of Oceania from George Orwell's "1984." It uses many English words, albeit with a greatly simplified vocabulary and sentence structure. The elimination of synonyms and antonyms helped this process. It was created in attempt to influence the thought of Oceania's citizens and make it impossible to express thoughts dangerous to Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism). Today this is recognized as political correctness . Examples: Minitruth="Ministry of Truth" (Oceanian propaganda ministry) Ungood="bad" Doublethink=the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at a time B-B="Big Brother", ie the State These translations give a rough estimate of some general rules when using Newspeak. Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

by Belisarius March 02, 2004 Newspeak In George Orwell's dystopia "Nineteen Eighty-Four", Newspeak was the corrupted/purged language everyone was supposed to speak according to the totalitarian dictatorship which ran everything. Words with subversive potential and those which had unclear meanings were eliminated, along with references to the past. The attempt was to bring language, and therefore thought, into line with the wishes of the rulers. It is also used to refer to any instance of politically-invented language put out through apparatuses of propaganda and social control or by spindoctors. Words like people-trafficker , collateral damage and downsizing are examples of real-world Newspeak. This doesn't mean you shouldn't make up new words. Nor does it mean that every political or invented word should be suspect. The point is that new words should expand meaning, not contract it. If a word is used to cover up abuses by the powerful or to manipulate people in favour of the existing regime, it's Newspeak.

by Andy May 01, 2004 Nineteen Eighty-Four - Wikiquote Nineteen Eighty-Four Jump to: navigation , search To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell , published in 1949. The story, which focuses on the life of Winston Smith, was Orwell's vision of a totalitarian state which has absolute control over every action and thought of its people through propaganda, secrecy, constant surveillance, and harsh punishment. In some editions it is retitled 1984. See also: Part One[ edit ] The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

The instrument (the telescreen it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime , they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

Chapter 2[ edit ] Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime IS death It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — 'child hero' was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime IS death Chapter 3[ edit ] Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. Chapter 5[ edit ] It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word?

A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well — better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Chapter 6[ edit ] Your worst enemy […] was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and — though the principle was never clearly stated — permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Chapter 8[ edit ] We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness, O’Brien had said to him. But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another.

They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.

When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time? He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. Chapter 2[ edit ] His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds — thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. Chapter 3[ edit ] If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot? There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.

For how could the fear, the htred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. "Actually, it would have made no difference," he said. "Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?" "Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all." "We're not dead yet," said Julia prosaically. "Not physically.

Six months, a year--five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing." Chapter 4[ edit ] The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as versificator. [Winston] turned over toward the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete.

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal. Chapter 5[ edit ] Both of them knew — in a way, it was never out of their minds — that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life.

Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. "You're only a rebel from the waist downwards," he told her. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. Chapter 7[ edit ] "Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal." She thought it over. "They can't do that," she said finally. "It's the one thing they can't do. They can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you." "No," he said a little more hopefully, "no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them." It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless.

If you loved someone, you loved him and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural for her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question.

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. Chapter 8[ edit ] The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell.

You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way. Chapter 9[ edit ] All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers. This section has been organized based on order of occurrence. Please consult the placement of the other quotes before adding another. The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result being that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked upon as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.

In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.

Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war", therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.

It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.

This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. There are only four ways in which a ruling class can fall from power.

Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

[…] The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. Sanity is not statistical. Chapter 1[ edit ] "They’ve got you too!" he cried. "They got me a long time ago," said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony . One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm. Chapter 2[ edit ] That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery?

Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him. I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. "How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four." "Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane." Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.

We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was Thou Shalt Not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou Shalt. Our command is Thou Art. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us.

What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves. Chapter 3[ edit ] The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves.

That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. 'We are the priests of power. God is power.

But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing, and then simply persists in his lunacy? The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. We control life, Winston, at all its levels.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent. "Tell me," [Winston] said, "how soon will they shoot me?" "It might be a long time," said O'Brien. "You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." Chapter 4[ edit ] How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. "Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!" For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence.

She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help. He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness? For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst. To die hating them, that was freedom. Chapter 5[ edit ] "You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101 .

I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." "By itself," he said, "pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you." Chapter 6[ edit ] 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. "They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you.

"What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. "In that moment you really do mean it" But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. Appendix[ edit ] 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. George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four Quotes about Nineteen Eighty-Four[ edit ] Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored. ~ Thomas Pynchon Alphabetized by author Found the P.M. absorbed in George Orwell's book, 1984.

‘Have you read it, Charles? Oh, you must. I'm reading it for a second time. It is a very remarkable book.’ Charles Wilson (Lord Moran) recounting a conversation with Winston Churchill in his diary for 19 February 1953, in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965 (Sphere, 1968), p. 423. 1984 has taught millions to look at the conflict between East and West in terms of black and white, and it has shown them a monster Bogy and a monster Scapegoat for all the ills that plague mankind... It would be dangerous to blind ourselves to the fact that millions of people in the West may be inclined, in their anguish and fear, to flee from their own responsibility for mankind's destiny and to vent their anger and despair on the giant Bogy-cum-Scapegoat which Orwell's 1984 has done so much to lay before their eyes. Isaac Deutscher , in "1984 —The Mysticism of Cruelty" in Heretics and Renegades (1955) "Have you read this book?

You must read it, sir. Then you will known why we must drop the atom bomb on the Bolshies!" With these words a blind, miserable news-vendor recommended to me 1984 in New York, a few weeks before Orwell's death. Poor Orwell, could he ever imagine that his own book would become so prominent an item in the programme of Hate week? Isaac Deutscher, in "1984 —The Mysticism of Cruelty" in Heretics and Renegades (1955) In North Korea , every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell 's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il-sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint.

20 Essential Words We Got From Literature | The Huffington Post 20 Essential Words We Got From Literature 10/02/2013 05:44 pm ET | Updated Dec 02, 2013 710 Oliver Tearle Author; Lecturer in English, Loughborough Univ. Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, "Shakespeare gave us the word puking" or "Milton coined the word dreary." The problem with this is, of course, we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words -- they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words in question. (Or, there may be earlier uses of the words out there, waiting to be discovered; it's just that more lexicographers and philologists are rereading As You Like It than are reading "A Treatise on Vomiting and Related Emettic Excurssions, 1588.") Shakespeare may have been the first one to think of putting "leap" and "frog" together to form "leapfrog"; but wouldn't his audience have wondered what the bally hell he was blathering on about?

So, here are 20 words which we can say, with some certainty, originated in works of literature. Enjoy. 1. Blatant. Used by Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99) in his epic poem "The Faerie Queene," this word originally referred to a thousand-tongued beast. Since then it has come to mean something that is glaringly obvious and in-your-face, like an elephant in the room (to use another idiom involving a large animal). 2. Chortle. Also known these days as the name of a comedy website, this word originated in Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," which was included in the 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass. The word is a blend of "chuckle" and "snort," describing the noise made by somebody who manages to laugh while utilizing their nose in the process. This sort of word-formation (which also gives us brunch and motel, not to mention chillax) is sometimes known as a... 3. Portmanteau. Also from Through the Looking-Glass, this term refers to the process of blending two existing words together to form a new word (e.g.

"bromance," to proffer another recent coinage). As Humpty-Dumpty explains to Alice, "You see, it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings packed into one word." "Portmanteau word" is a term sometimes used by professional linguists, although "blend" is more common. A portmanteau is a bag that opens into two halves -- hence Humpty's use of the term -- that was used in the 19th century, often to carry clothes ("portmanteau" comes from the French meaning "carry the cloak"). 4. Galumph. Also from -- you guessed it -- Through the Looking-Glass, and also -- right again! -- a portmanteau word. This time the word refers to the Jabberwock of the poem's title (the beast is the Jabberwock, the poem "Jabberwocky"), describing its movement ("galumphing" being a blend of "gallop" and "triumph"). One final little titbit about Carroll's book: it was "first published" in both 1871 and 1872.

This is weird but true: it appeared in 1871, but it was postdated to 1872, and this means that you can claim it was technically published in either year (depending on your interpretation of that word "technically"). The same fate would befall Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900). 5. Airy-fairy. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) may have gone on to become one of the greatest poets of the Victorian age -- he was Poet Laureate for a record 42 years -- but his early poetry met with mixed reviews. One early review borrowed a phrase invented by Tennyson in his poem "Lilian" and used it as a derogatory expression to describe Alfred's own verse: the opening lines of the poem, "Airy fairy Lilian..." provided the critic with the wishy-washiness of "airy-fairy" and the phrase hasn't looked back since. And while we're on that... 6. Namby-pamby.

From the poet Ambrose Philips (1674-1749), writer of rather wet, babyish verses which he dedicated to his friends' and patrons' infant children. Philips's poetry earned some praise, but his fellow writers -- notably Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift -- lost no opportunity to ridicule Philips for his childish doggerel. Another poet, Henry Carey, wrote a scathing verse about Philips, describing him as "Namby Pamby" in a poem of 1725 (from "Amby," childish form of "Ambrose"). Since then, anything a bit wet and weak-willed and infantile has been branded "namby-pamby." Poor Ambrose! 7. Utopia. Coined by Sir Thomas More -- the statesman whom Henry VIII later had executed -- this word was first used as the name for More's fictional island in his 1516 book, Utopia. In this book, which More wrote in Latin, he outlines the ideal society, though his suggestions are to be taken with a pinch of salt. The word "utopia" has since become used to describe any ideal world.

The word is from the Greek u-topos meaning "no place" (with a pun on eu-topos, "good place"). 8. Thoughtcrime. A useful word thought up by George Orwell for his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The idea that you can be convicted for even thinking of committing a crime -- which is itself threatened in the "Ten Commandments" -- is one which Orwell, scourge of totalitarianism, loathed and sought to depict through the figure of Big Brother. As Hamlet says, "Who shall 'scape whipping?" 9. Pandemonium. Okay, so this one is from Milton, from his great epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). But given the specific way this word was formed, we can be pretty sure it was an original coinage dreamt up by Milton himself. Meaning literally "all demons," Pandemonium was Satan's capital city in Milton's poem. Since then, and given its connotations of chaos and evil, the word has come to mean any disordered confusion, but it retains its demonic glint in the word "pandemonium." We just don't hear it any more. 10. Yahoo!

Known as a homepage, mailing service, and search engine on that there interweb, "yahoo" started life as the name for a race of brutish humans in Jonathan Swift's celebrated fantasy satire Gulliver's Travels (1726). From there, it went on to refer to any hooligan or noisy, loutish individual, and is these days perhaps most commonly encountered with ".com" after it. Cheers, Jonny Swift. Nice word. 11. Nerd. From a 1950 book by Dr Seuss, If I Ran the Zoo. In the poem, a nerd is one of the imaginary animals the narrator claims he will collect for his zoo. As a rough translation for "geek," the word entered popular use by the end of the 1950s. 12. Trilby. As in the hat. In 1895, George du Maurier -- grandfather of the novelist Daphne du Maurier -- published his novel Trilby, about bohemian Paris in the 1850s. The most famous characters in the novel are Trilby -- the heroine -- and Svengali, the magician and hypnotist.

From this novel we got the name for the trilby hat (which was first worn in the stage productions of the novel, but doesn't feature in the novel itself) and the term "svengali," meaning a person who controls or manipulates another. 13. Mentor. This one is from ancient Greece, and the work of Homer -- specifically, The Odyssey, the epic poem which recounts the adventures of Odysseus (so this same work also gives us the word "odyssey," meaning an adventure). Odysseus took 10 years to get home from the Trojan Wars, because of many mishaps and digressions (we'd heartily recommend reading this poem, which reads like an early fantasy novel and was used as the framework for one of the great novels of the 20th century, James Joyce's Ulysses). In Odysseus' absence, the character of Mentor advised Telemachus, Odysseus' son -- hence the modern connotation of the word of "mentor" as "adviser." 14. Stentorian. This is also from Homer, but this time, it's from his other epic poem, The Iliad.

Stentor was a herald in the Greek army during the Trojan Wars, and had a loud, thundering voice. Consequently, he gave his name to the adjective "stentorian," meaning "loud and thundering" (of a voice). Simple, really. And a great word. 15. Malapropism. From Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals. The word "malapropos" is found in print from 1630 with the sense of "in an inopportune, inappropriate, or awkward manner," hence Mrs. Malaprop's name, and the meaning of "malapropism," namely the use of an incorrect word in place of a word of similar sound, e.g.

"pineapple" for "pinnacle" in "He is the very pineapple of politeness." In 2005 the New Scientist reported an amusing literature-related example of someone uttering a malapropism in place of the word "malapropism" itself: an office worker had described a colleague as "a vast suppository of information" (instead of "repository"), and, upon learning his mistake, the worker is said to have apologized for his "Miss-Marple-ism" (instead of "malapropism"). Malapropisms are reasonably famous (or infamous), but what is less well known is that a malapropism is alternatively known as a "Dogberryism," after an earlier literary character with this characteristic: namely, Dogberry, the chief of police in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and the one who (inadvertently) manages to resolve the confusion generated by villain Don John's evil scheme. "Dogberryism" is attested by the OED from 1836. 16. Syphilis. This word had its origin in a 1530 poem written by an Italian physician and poet, Girolamo Fracastoro.

The poem recounts how Syphilus, a shepherd boy, is afflicted with the disease (which was commonly known at the time as "the French disease"). 17. Pamphlet. Pamphlets have a long literary history, with Daniel Defoe being a prolific pamphleteer, but what most people probably aren't aware of is the fact that "pamphlet" is itself a word derived from a literary work: the word comes from a comic love poem dating from the 14th century and written in Latin. The poem, "Pamphilus; or, Concerning Love," somehow became associated with unbound booklets (we say "somehow," because the word's modern political connotations didn't emerge until the 17th century). The name Pamphilus is actually from the Greek meaning "friend of everyone" or "lover of all." 18. Gargantuan. This word, denoting something very large, is from French writer Rabelais' The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, a long work full of bawdy and scatological references written in the 16th century.

Gargantua, in Rabelais' novel, is born calling for ale, and with an erection a yard long. 19. Serendipity. Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, coined the word "serendipity" in the 18th century. It means the "faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident." He coined the word in a letter of 1754, when recounting the "silly fairy tale" ("fairy tale" is another term he is credited with inventing) of "The Three Princes of Serendip" (Serendip being a former name for Sri Lanka). We have written about Walpole previously, and in more detail, here . 20. Robot. The word "robot" has its origins in a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek, called R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The word is taken from the Czech for "drudge" or "slave." However, contrary to popular belief, Čapek did not coin the word. Or rather, Karel Čapek didn't.

The playwright was searching for a word to call the androids which featured in his play and was dissatisfied with labori (from the Latin for "work"). He sought advice from his brother, Josef Čapek, who suggested roboti. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov is credited with inventing the spin-off word "robotic" -- Asimov famously formulated the Three Laws of Robotics. Follow Oliver's writing at interestingliterature.wordpress.com Follow Oliver Tearle on Twitter: More:

Question: What famous novel invented the terms "thoughtcrime" and "doubleplusgood"?
Answer: Nineteen Eighty-Four