the.com/newspeak

a language built to make certain thoughts literally unsayable.

means A deliberately shrunken, doublethink-laced form of language designed to narrow what people can even think, not just say — and by extension, any propaganda-speak that does the same.

from Coined by George Orwell in his 1949 novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' where it's the Party's official language, engineered to eliminate words for rebellious or nuanced ideas so that 'thoughtcrime' becomes literally unspeakable. Orwell built the word itself as a specimen of its own target: a blunt compound of 'new' and 'speak,' stripped of ornament, in the clipped bureaucratic style he was satirizing. It escaped fiction almost immediately, becoming shorthand for any political language that distorts or diminishes meaning to control thought.

origin
coined by Orwell in 1984, 1949
design goal
shrink vocabulary yearly, not grow it
core trick
duckspeak: words that bypass actual thinking
real-world cousin
any euphemism that erases the thing it names
the.com · every word