The Corruption of Language or the Construction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Words in <odern Society as seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Corruption of Language or the Construction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Words in Modern Society as seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Summary/Abstract: George Orwell writes that „if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought‟ (Orwell, 1946:8). This remark only leads to a vicious circle where those who control language are in fact in charge of our thoughts, of what we think and in charge of the manner on how we have to react to our reality. This paper aims to analyze the procedures that are used to control and undermine people‟s freedom and also the importance of the meaning of the words that were used for such an endeavor. If the destruction of words is „a beautiful thing‟ (Orwell, 2015:65) and if every aspect of our life and common memory can be altered, we‟ll have to ask ourselves what exactly is considered to be real and what is fiction. The answer to this question is not only philosophical but also scary for a fragile immature human intellect: reality only exists in one‟s mind and nowhere else, meaning that all we can see, feel, touch, smell and hear is somehow part of our imagination and our experimentation of what we perceive as being real. By exploring this Orwellian labyrinth of changing words and meanings, we can find out what consequences we can expect when we change past events and coin new meanings for the same old words.

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