Who gets to name the world?
By Rod Benson
Imagine a government announcing that it will “right-size” a service. The phrase sounds responsible, yet tells us little. Will people lose their jobs? Will a hospital close? Who decided what the “right” size is? The wording has not concealed every fact, but it has delayed the questions that matter. Novelists as well as advertisers and political speechwriters understand this power of words: they may sharpen perception, soften a disturbing reality, compel behaviour, and make an imposed view of the world feel natural.
George Orwell gave the most famous fictional account of this phenomenon in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ruling Party is developing a revised lexicon called Newspeak to serve its political order. As the novel’s appendix explains, Newspeak is invented to reduce the range of thought. Vocabulary is cut down, words lose unwanted meanings, and distinctions useful to dissent disappear. The Party hopes that, once the older language is forgotten, opposition will become harder even to formulate. In the year 1984, this remains an unfinished project: people still speak the older language.
Newspeak works alongside other inventions. “Doublethink” names the cultivated ability to accept contradictions when the Party requires it. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, altering records to fit the current political line. The ministry’s name gives falsification the public identity of truth-telling. There are three other state departments in the novel: the Ministry of Peace, which conducts global wars; the Ministry of Love, which enforces loyalty through repression and torture; and the Ministry of Plenty, which manages the economy and planned shortages of goods. A regime gains power when it can determine which descriptions circulate, which records survive, and which contradictions people learn to tolerate.
Orwell had explored the everyday version of this problem in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”. Euphemism, vague phrasing and ready-made expressions, he argued, can distance speakers from what they are defending. They spare audiences the effort of picturing it. Confused thinking produces evasive language; habitual evasion, in turn, makes clear thinking less likely. Newspeak magnifies that tendency into a political system.
Anthony Burgess invented language for a different purpose in A Clockwork Orange. Its teenage narrator, Alex, speaks Nadsat, a slang drawing heavily on Russian and other sources. Readers must work out unfamiliar words from context. Burgess said he intended them to acquire a little Russian almost without noticing. Nadsat also gives Alex’s group an identity and draws readers into its viewpoint. One possible effect is that his jaunty account of brutality becomes less immediately shocking as the reader grows familiar with his vocabulary. That is an interpretation of the reading experience, rather than Burgess’s stated purpose. Unlike Newspeak, Nadsat grows out of a subculture; it is not an official programme to restrict everyone’s speech.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale offers another variation. In Gilead, a Handmaid assigned to a commander called Fred bears the name “Offred”: “of Fred”. Her identity is expressed through her relation to a man who holds power over her. The name need not erase her memory to do political work. Each repetition restates the role the regime has assigned her.
Science fiction takes the question further: what if language were designed to produce particular kinds of people? In Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao, outsiders introduce separate languages for warriors, technicians and merchants. Their project aims to cultivate capacities the planners want the society to develop, but also assigns people roles devised by those directing the experiment. A language intended to strengthen a community can help organise and control its members.
Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 offers a darker possibility. During an interstellar conflict, a poet and linguist investigates a mysterious language connected to enemy attacks. The language is more than a code: among its striking features is the absence of a word for “I”. Delany uses this speculative device to explore a speaker’s sense of agency. Could someone act without readily recognising themselves as the actor? The premise is fictional, but it illuminates the more familiar habit of describing actions while obscuring who performed them.
Fiction makes these mechanisms conspicuous. In public life, evasions take several forms. A weasel word such as “helps” can weaken an apparent promise: a product that “helps support” an outcome may promise very little. “Many people believe” invokes unnamed supporters. “Mistakes were made” uses the passive voice to leave responsibility unstated. None of these forms is necessarily dishonest. Each becomes suspect when it avoids information the audience needs.
Other devices change the emotional frame. Euphemism can make a painful subject easier to discuss, but it can also hide an injury behind administrative calm. “Collateral damage” can describe civilian deaths, injuries or damage to property without naming the people harmed. “Workforce adjustment” may direct attention to an organisation’s plans while saying little about workers who lose their jobs. Calling a disputed proposal “common sense” suggests that reasonable people need not examine it. A description can influence the debate without being plainly false.
The fictional examples need careful handling. Human beings can think about things for which they lack a convenient word; a language cannot simply programme every thought. Yet language can affect what people readily notice, say and discuss. New expressions may clarify experiences that older vocabulary obscured. The danger arises when powerful speakers insist on one description while making more precise accounts costly, suspect or difficult to hear.
These novels teach us to cultivate a habit of attention. When a phrase sounds reassuring, ask what concrete action it describes. When an institution gives something a noble name, compare the name with what it does. When a speaker says that “people are saying” something, ask who these people are. And when those who are most affected use a novel name for their experience, listen closely. The contest over language is also a contest over whose account of reality counts, today and tomorrow.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
Image source: author
