Kev, you've learned that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is relevant even today. I first read the novel in 1965 and it was sure timely then.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written during the early Cold War years and Stalin's regime. A lot of the dystopian agencies were based on what existed in the USSR at the time, eg. Thought Police was the Soviet NKVD.
I still have my old copy of the book. It's time for a re-read.
It is a bit Stalinist, but things like the new language Newspeak are extremely creepy.
For those who havent read it..
NewSpeak is a language being developed by the Party during the events of 1984. It is based on English, but is heavily simplified, removing both synonyms and antonyms: brilliant, amazing, wonderful, fantastic, awful, terrible, horrible and many others are condensed into good, plusgood, doubleplusgood, ungood, plusungood, and doubleplusungood. Its role is to narrow the range of thought. As thought can only happen with words, fewer words with simpler meanings and less of a range produce more concise thoughts, allowing the Party to have more control over its members.
Things like nursery rhyme's have disappeared.
"Oranges and Lemons" is an English nursery rhyme. It consists of a semi-nonsensical conversation between the bells of various London churches. In the novel, Winston reconstructs it by hearing fragments from various Londoners. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it serves as an example of the eradication of shared culture, and is foreshadowed as being lost forever after the final few people who remember it die.
"Oranges and lemons,"
Say the bells of St. Clement's.
"You owe me five farthings,"
Say the bells of St. Martin's.
"When will you pay me?"
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
"When I grow rich,"
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
