Current Events > Something that strikes me about 1984's take on dystopia is the language

(+) Yeah! (+)

Specifically, how the government bans and cuts out words until dictionaries begin to shrink, controlling thought by controlling language.

The right wing love to roll out "thoughtcrime!" and "newspeak!" when people popularise new, more progressive terms to replace old ones which have fallen by the wayside. You can't call gay people or trans people this list of slurs any more, it's the woke thought police exercising mind control through language control!

But you have those same people criticising the "rainbow people" for "making shit up", as well as the medical community for defining new disorders and the like - "no-one was autistic in my day, this is just an overreach by big pharma to overmedicate people when they just need a hard dose of reality!".

So the right co-opts the point of the newspeak dictionary to say "the fact that calling people slurs isn't allowed is a sign that we're being oppressed". But they don't realise - or, less generously, they know full well - that their pushing back against a broader attempt to catalogue new things in an attempt to better fit in and be able to help others more efficiently is fulfilling exactly what they're supposedly complaining about.

With less words to work with, you have less room to discuss and verbalise things - to really flesh them out. The queer community has been able to self-determinate by being able to identify gayness, bisexuality, transgenderism etc. Doctors have been able to remove stigma from mentally challenged people after the right-wing weaponised a medical term as a slur against them, and through the establishment of the autism spectrum, we now have a more robust framework to work with people who have neurological disorders.

So dismissive terms against queer and disabled people are fine, and changing language to reflect how those terms have been used for the sake of bigotry is what's leading to "thoughtcrime". But adopting a broader range of terms to describe different queer identities and broadening the scope of different neurological disorders to better treat people of different severities is "newspeak" that's dumbing down the discourse to reduce the efficiency of communication.

I would argue the opposite. We have more detailed phrases - and more phrases, period - to respectfully and intuitively discuss different queer identities. We have a broader understanding of autism, the different forms it can take and the severity of the condition - we now have the language to effectively treat the condition, and with our increased understanding of the condition we can now accommodate the needs of autistic people more than ever because we understand autistic people and their condition better than ever.

Meanwhile, things we're trying to phase out - slurs - paint a broad picture of something and attach a negative stigma to it, and then end the conversation on that note. They're self-terminating rhetoric that other people find hurtful when used towards themselves, hence the new lingual infrastructure we've built to discuss race, sexuality and disability in a more in-depth way - in a way that reflects the experiences of those groups and fleshes out the experiences that are common to those groups.

"Wokeness" has helped a lot of people develop a better understanding of different groups of people, and it did that through new jargon. People expanded the use of language to better describe something that's been made to be nebulous and weird through mainstream ostracization of it. Mentally disabled people are this slur, let's laugh at them based on broad stereotypes and refuse to take disabled people seriously or accommodate their specific disability. Queer people are this slur, they're a stereotype that hurt all the "straight" queers who this slur doesn't apply to (except it does because they're queer and that's still disdainful).

Those slurs are closer to newspeak than something "cringy" like grey-asexual homoromantic trans woman. We've established the language to the point that people can express themselves to a broader degree. And we know damn well that people were autistic and had other neurological issues in the past - but they were either labelled as a slur, institutionalised as a defective person or were referred to in hushed tones as the "quiet" uncle, or the "weird" one. That has changed with a broader understanding of mental disability, and people who do suffer from more severe conditions are able to live content lives because time, research and revised treatment has allowed us to facilitate their quality of life - and for that matter, it's allowed those people to facilitate their own quality of life.

I write long posts like this because language is all I have. This is how I communicate. If I had to jam myself into a box and express myself in a certain amount of words, or if I had to "dumb it down" to be taken more seriously, I wouldn't be able to properly flesh out my thoughts and feelings. That's one reason why I get so exasperated about people who complain about "the woke police", the same way people scaremongered about "SJWs" as recently as 2018, because they're being judged for oblique, bull-headed and hostile discourse. You have the ability to learn a new concept and understand the language behind it to better understand the concept, but because it's too far out of an unchallenged worldview, you write it off as nonsense and choose to mock it with the same bland, basic platitudes you've been repeating since grade school.

The world benefits from a dictionary that has more words in it, and a population who's open to new ideas, concepts and language. The newspeak dictionary in 1984 is slivered down to a fraction of the size it once was through the use of a government censor. The way to combat that kind of information control is to keep adding to the cultural lexicon, keep growing language and fleshing out concepts, and making more descriptive language for future generations to learn and carry with them.

"socialist brain worms" tho

GrandConjuraton posted...

"socialist brain worms" tho

Another platitude.