re: Algospeak - thank you Chicken for not bowing to mob

It’s scary how dead on Orwell was. Just off on his timing by a few decades.

quote:

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In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will,[1][2] which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism.[3][4]

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Words over time do change their meanings. I remember my high school French teacher telling me about her experience in France. She was a South Louisiana native that learned Cajun French and was well versed in it.

While she was in France, she told someone that they looked like a baby doll. She used the Cajun French word "catin" instead of the Perisian French word "poupée" for baby doll.

So the people she was talking to thought she called the girl a prostitue since the modern Perisian word "catin" had evolved to mean prostitue and and "poupee" for doll.