My youngest was 16 months old and I swear I was having full kn conversations with her. She couldn’t speak, but she could gesture and match my tone. She clearly understood just about everything I was saying.
I’ve always liked linguistics. Delved into very superficially in law school in the context of statutory interpretation. Plenty of legal people have written a ton about it, but I found the linguistic analyses very interesting.
Anyway, since you majored, I’m still not really clear on what you mean by how the newspeak in 1984 is not realistic for dystopian predictions (summarizing) because it’s not how linguistics work. Can you elaborate?
It’s like with war and how the victor writes the history of it; the victor might also write the dictionary by shaping the majority lexicon. Part of the fascist toolkit is coopting language to prevent subjugated people from having the tools to resist.
All this don’t say gay, don’t say trans stuff, book bannings, in the south. The attacks on critical race analysis. They didn’t their slaves how to read or write either, let alone how to organize a vote drive or something.
Unless I misunderstood you, what is so inherent about linguistics that stops a fascist from redefining a word or obfuscating it’s original meaning (in the mind of its hearer (forgot the term for this)) to serve a political end?