Doublespeak - Origins and Concepts

Origins and Concepts

There is no explicit mention on where doublespeak's primary concepts came from. However, doublespeak might possibly have certain concepts taken from George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although there is no mention of Doublespeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it has been argued that the term is a combination of two concepts - Doublethink and Newspeak which are original to his work. Comparisons have been made between Doublespeak and Orwell's descriptions on political speech from his essays Politics and the English Language in which "unscrupulous politicians, advertisers, religionists, and other doublespeakers of whatever stripe continue to abuse language for manipulative purposes".

Edward S. Herman, political economist and media analyst, has highlighted some examples of doublespeak and doublethink in modern society. Herman describes in his book, Beyond Hypocrisy the principle characteristics of doublespeak;

What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.

In his essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell observes that political language serves to distort and obfuscate reality. Orwell’s description of political speech is extremely similar to the contemporary definition of doublespeak;

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, ...

Similarities can be observed in Orwell’s own definition of doublethink, from Nineteen Eighty-Four;

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.