newspeak

name

1. The fictional language devised to meet the needs of Ingsoc and designed to restrict the words, and thereby the thoughts, of the citizens of Oceania in the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

   “In Orwell’s 1984, the use of ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, known as Newspeak, diminishes the range of a person’s thought process. For example, in Newspeak, the term “Fake News” would replace the words: accurate, correct, factual and reliable news reporting.”

   “The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc). Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words.”

2. A highly dynamic and reflective programming language descended from Smalltalk, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming.

   “Many modern languages like Haskell, Scala, and Newspeak offer parser combinators as libraries on top of the core language.”

noun

1. (alt-of, uncountable, usually)Alternative letter-case form of newspeak.

   “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.”

   “In 2020, Trump has provided the American people with plenty of Newspeak to explain away the current and growing nationwide spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

2. (uncountable, usually)Use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.

   “[…] Soviet ideology itself may be more productively viewed as the result of conscious attempts to explicate and rationalize assorted discursive strategies, or mechanisms, of newspeak, in much the same way as grammatical rules are invented to describe diverse linguistic practices.”