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Chris Fox's avatar

Orwell never heard of Sapir-Whorf

The control is not absolute but it’s real.

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Will Shetterly's avatar

The attempt to control words is real in the novel. That does not mean it will be effective. Authoritarians try to make people do all sorts of things that don't work.

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Chris Fox's avatar

I've probably read the novel over a dozen times, and the appendices alone many times more.

Some people have a mastery of language that enables them to circumvent unrepresented concepts.

Most people don't.

But authoritarianism isn't the only justification for controlling language or resisting stupid mistakes' promotion to new meanings. If I managed a group of coworkers and one of them used "reveal," "invite," "react," or "ask" as a noun, he'd discover hell, without dying first, in my office. And don't even let me get started on the singular they.

Nothing to do with authoritarianism.

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Will Shetterly's avatar

Controlling language is all about authoritarianism. English is a bastard that evolves willy-nilly. You can't stop it. You can only object to the stupider changes and hope they don't catch on. Ones that start in the working class are probably here to stay. Ones that start in the owning class--like a lot of the language of liberal identitarians--can be fought. I'm still annoyed that "impact" has become a verb, but I've accepted that that fight's lost.

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Chris Fox's avatar

Impact and target.

"Invite" is probably lost, but I will never accept any of the four I mentioned and I will shiver to death in a Maytag box under an overpass before I will use the singular "they," or let it go by unremarked.

I learned Russian when I was 13. I was a smart 8th grader and the school allowed me to take the course even though it was for 9th grade on up, because I was going out of my mind as an 8th grader. Anyway.

I drew a little table; rows, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person. Columns, singular and plural. Where is the other "you?" OK, now I know that "thou" is deprecated.

Then I heard someone say a sentence pairing "someone" and "they" and instantly I had a splitting headache. Realized everyone did this. I never used they as a singular ever again; I am 56 years older now and have never once had to come up with any awkward grammar to avoid it, in fact I can usually use fewer words.

Along came "trans" and those "nonbinary" retards and suddenly "he" and "she" have all but vanished. No, I am not giving in to that.

I am certified in ESL all the way to teaching C2 and for eight years I taught my students (Vietnam) that "they" was used incorrectly by most Americans and not to adopt it.

We do what we can.

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