Employees at several federal agencies were ordered Friday to remove their pronouns from any email signatures and grant applications, according to internal memos obtained by ABC News.
The memos ...
The Center Square: Federal employees reportedly told to remove pronouns from email signatures.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
I’ve said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn’t even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn’t even comprehendable to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn’t required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven’t learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren’t notable when used.
21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.
This is disgusting.
Fuck “No Child Left Behind”. Kids shouldn’t pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don’t care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.
Oregon, despite being home to Powell’s books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of “equity” for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.
That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.
Yeah, I know a little about what they’re dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.
The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They’d already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.
Reminds me of…
I’ve said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn’t even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn’t even comprehendable to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn’t required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven’t learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren’t notable when used.
21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.
This is disgusting.
Fuck “No Child Left Behind”. Kids shouldn’t pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don’t care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.
Oregon, despite being home to Powell’s books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of “equity” for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.
That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.
They’re teaching phonics still in 3rd grade.
Yeah, I know a little about what they’re dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.
The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They’d already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.
I had my son read this book. He was partway through and began exclaiming how much it paralleled today.