Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

--The Principles of Newspeak,"1984," by George Orwell

Media girl alerted us to the article Microsoft joins hands with Yahoo!, Google to censor China's web

BEIJING (AFP) - Users of Microsoft's new China-based Internet portal have been blocked from using the words "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights" in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing.

Other words that could not be used on Microsoft's free online blog service MSN Spaces include "Taiwan independence" and "demonstration".

Bloggers who enter such words or other politically charged or pornographic content are prompted with a message that reads: "This item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item".

Officials at Microsoft's Beijing offices refused to comment.

Certain words are under siege. Stop words such as "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights." By removing these offending words from the conversation, the gray men who run Red China, hope to manage the dialog.

Is this something out of Ayn Rand's "Anthem," or Orwell's "1984?" Alas, this isn't science fiction. The grinning Gates, who caved to anti-gay activist Christian fundamentalists and abandoned diversity policies (if only temporarily), now kowtows to the neo-Emperors who have left the Forbidden City for fancier digs. Certain words are out, and that's it! You want all the money China has? Then there is a price you will pay.

Do search engines have a price?

We run searches on the mighty corporate engines for which we seemingly pay nothing, yet we see how valuable Google, for example, is. The valuation is enormous

With share prices nearing the $300 mark and current market capitalization topping $80 billion, Google is considered the most valuable media company in the world, surpassing the $78 billion value of Time-Warner and rising far above Yahoo's estimated value of $56 billion.

Yes, lucky us. The Internet is free. We pay nothing . . . "and now a word from our sponsors."

Of course there's Darknet and the super-Internet that's being assembled in secret with blazing speed - but don't worry, "we won't charge much. We never do. Trust us."

Are there any search mavens here? Those who do serious searching know there are eight words allowed. We can exclude words with a "minus" sign in front and get different results by doubling (repeating) the same word twice. There are words that are ignored, the so-called "stop" words such as "a," "an," "the," which the engine ignores unless it is specifically told to include these, but they count against the allowed eight. And, of course, after eight, the engine ignores the rest, although there are special tricks to look at 16.

Newspeak

So it's here. Orwell's prediction that sometime after 1984, language itself would be modified wholesale to enforce the will of the state. We read about Newspeak, in an appendix at the end of the novel.

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.

. . .

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten . . .

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.

--The Principles of Newspeak,"1984," by George Orwell

Written in 1947, Orwell wanted to title his cautionary tale "1948," but the publishers insisted the digits be switched and turned it into "1984." It could have easily been called "Tomorrow," or "Next Year."

The New Stop Words

It's almost eerie how the new "Stop Words" are entering the search engines.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink,

--The Principles of Newspeak,"1984," by George Orwell

Let's look at how this has progressed outside of the realm of Boolean words and symbols. Let us think about the terms "Christian," and "sanctity of marriage," and "family values" as words and the following passage from Orwell.

Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death.

--The Principles of Newspeak,"1984," by George Orwell

In the 1968 "Esquire" retrospective on Orwell, the sidebar said,

He warned us of men who think in slogans and speak in bullets.

The book is set in "1984," but it's real ending is 2050. Perhaps I will live long enough to see this world, but then I pause and reflect.

Maybe there needs to be a remake of the film "1984" that tanked at the box office? Maybe it is better than the raft of "futuristic" films being made today.

But then I pause. The film is being made around me as I speak. All I have to do is point my camera around at the world, and there it is.