riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (09/11/83)
Laura Creighton (utzoo!utcsstat!laura) recently made some interesting comments in net.ai which I think bear further discussion in net.nlang. To wit: Sorry, but the 1984 analogy does not quite wash. there you got rid of whole words and phrases wholesale and did not replace them with anything. Thus is is a little difficult to talk about "freedom" when there is no word for freedom. This does not mean that 'freedom' as a concept ceased to exist -- note how the main characters in 1984 still valued freedom, even though they could not talk well about it. I think that the "thought-police" (was that the phrase used? It has been a long time since i read 1984) and their brainwashing techniques should not be discounted. I believe that even more than the Ministry of Truth, they contributed to the eradication of certain traits from society. While the book 1984, and its image of "The Ministry of Truth" is a classic in distopias, I do not think that it presents an enforceable view of society. I cannot invision any brainwashing/diciplining facility that could get me and all my friends from discussing 'freedom', even if we were forced to call it 'drano pipe declogger'. The last time I was in Cuba, where one learns to watch the words that you speak, it was still possible to go to the beach with friends and discuss freedom, and possible ways to overthrow Castro. Good point, but there is unfortunately a better way to get rid of a concept than to throw the word associated with it out of the language: namely to overburden the word with other, unrelated, concepts. Thus 'freedom' can cease to mean 'freedom from oppression' and start meaning 'freedom to oppress': freedom to institute school prayers, freedom to maintain de facto segregation, freedom to ban abortion, freedom to create ecological disaster, and even freedom to fight imperialistic wars. Maybe I am overstretching my point by trying to tie it to political specifics (after all, I did choose to bring this up in net.nlang and not net.politics), but let me restate it a bit more mildly: the words associated with many of our most cherished concepts -- 'freedom', 'democracy', etc. -- have become highly charged buzzwords which often refer either to nothing at all or to concepts rather far removed from their origins. I don't pretend that this was the work of any "Ministry of Truth", but I suspect that good propagan- dists could make very effective use of similar linguistic processes. Any comment? -- Prentiss Riddle {ihnp4,ut-ngp}!ut-sally!riddle riddle@ut-sally.{UUCP,ARPA}
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (09/14/83)
There is probably some relation between this process and the way the word "hacker" suddenly changed meaning once it went public a couple of weeks ago. No longer can we tell someone that we "hack computers," since this now means that we are thieves. Does anyone have any good ideas for how to restore the good name of hackers in light of this disaster? -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar