'You think, I daresay, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone... Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?'
No, that's not Florida Governor Scott telling his troops to ban the terms "climate change" and "global warming" in all government correspondence, although it could be. Nor is it the NYC Council arguing over the use of "bitch" and "ho." It's the venomously orthodox Syme talking to Winston in George Orwell's 1984.
Syme understands that if you curtail language properly, you limit the range of thought and eliminate the possibility of thoughtcrime. In Florida, admitting human's control over climate is thoughtcrime. In Oklahoma, suggesting that America is unexceptional is thoughtcrime. In South Carolina, putting together the words "evolution" and "fact" is thoughtcrime.
1984 was 31 years ago, but some states are just catching up.
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