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Copywork
About This Passage
At lunch, Winston's coworker Syme excitedly explains his job building Newspeak, the Party's new language. Notice that he is proud not of making words but of destroying them. The first sentence piles up the scale of the destruction, scores and hundreds every single day, so the reader feels how huge and relentless it is. The vivid second sentence, cutting the language down to the bone, makes the language sound like a body being stripped to nothing. Syme means this as praise, but Orwell wants us to feel the horror: the Party is shrinking the very words people have to think with.
We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: Winston eats lunch in the crowded, noisy canteen; his coworker Syme excitedly explains that his job is to destroy words and build Newspeak so that one day people will not even have the words to think forbidden thoughts; Winston privately decides that Syme is too clever and will one day be vaporized; their neighbor Parsons joins them, proud of his spy-children; a nearby man pours out a quacking stream of pure Party slogans; the telescreen announces that life has improved and the chocolate ration has gone up, though Winston knows it was just cut, and everyone happily believes it; Winston broods on the grim, dirty texture of life and wonders if it was ever better; and a dark-haired girl keeps watching him, filling him with terror that she may be a spy. When you reach Syme's delight in destroying words, slow down and weigh why shrinking a language could shrink what people are able to think.
Discussion Questions
- Syme is proud that his job is to destroy words, so that one day people will not have the words to think forbidden thoughts. What does it reveal about the Party that it wants to shrink the very language people think in, and why? What part of the chapter supports your reading?
- Winston feels certain that the clever, loyal Syme will one day be vaporized. Why might a Party like this one come to fear even a devoted member who is too intelligent, and why? What part of the chapter supports your reading?
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Filled with wild, extreme devotion to a cause; the quacking man at the next table believes the Party's lies with a fierce, blazing passion, ready to hunt down anyone who doubts.
Item 2
No longer used and out of date; Syme boasts that the new dictionary will hold no word due to fall out of use, because every spare one has been wiped out.
Item 3
Strictly following the official, approved beliefs; Syme keeps perfectly to the Party line, cheering every victory and hating its enemies more than most.
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Critical Thinking
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