From the time a child is born, the adults who surround it begin to teach it about words. “No” means don’t do something, “food” satisfies hunger, “teddy” is soft and cuddly. Of course, words mean more than that, and when a child first says “Mama” or “Dada” or any version of those words, the parents are exhilarated. Words are the connections between the concrete and the abstract, the means by which we spread ideas and express ourselves.  

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” which means that a person’s understanding of the world in which he lives extends only as far as the language with which he can describe it. Although he retracted that statement later on in his life, Wittgenstein’s insight into the human psyche was unsurpassed. George Orwell later examined that idea in his book “1984,” which reveals the truth of that statement. 

In Orwell’s book, the government endeavors to restrict the language used by the citizens, which they do by removing words from the vocabulary available to the inhabitants of the world. In their seeming attempt to make language more precise, the government workers create a language called Newspeak that is formed only of dichotomies, which are opposite ideas (pleasure and pain, good and bad, high and low).

However, far from stopping at that destruction of the shades of meaning which language has, the government employees went further, removing the antonyms and parts of speech of such words and replacing them with prefixes and suffixes that change the meaning, so that “ungood” is used to represent “bad,” “ungoodful” is used to represent “badly,” “gooder” is used to represent “better” and “ungoodest” is used to represent “worst.”

By doing this, the nuances of words are removed, and the ways in which the people could think and communicate were destroyed.

Also, certain concepts, such as crime, freedom, rebellion and other “dangerous” ideas were taken out of the language completely.

The aim of those actions was to create a language in which no sentence or word could possibly imply or convey illegal ideas or plans. The government figured that if there were no way for the people to think of unlawful things, there would be no way for them to make criminal plans and put them into action.

When I first read the book, the concept of language destruction interested me more than the story of the book itself.

The idea that language and culture determine how a person thinks and behaves explains both history and how people act today. Language itself is an amazing feat performed by the human mind, and the more people know about their language, the more accurately they can convey to others the things they consider important.

When people can’t think of a word to describe their emotions, thoughts or beliefs, their communication is restricted by that inability, and the connection that is formed between people who talk to each other is broken for a moment because of the mental wall that comes into existence. 

But communication isn’t composed entirely of words. There are things that could never be fully put into words that are expressed so easily in an action.

Saying “I love you” is very nice, but the hug that often comes with it reveals much more of the speaker’s feelings. Children need to be touched with affection, and a lack of such expressed love often leads to a less than healthy child.

Also, communication is more than talking — there must be someone to listen, to show that someone cares about what is being said and the person who is saying it. In my mind, fullness of communication takes into account all of those things and causes a decline in misunderstandings.

From what I see in the news every day, our world could use a little more of that.