On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Alex Schroeder wrote: >> PS: Hey, what happened to the Newspeak tradition? We should sprinkle >> some doubleplus ungood in these messages... > > Yes, I'm all in favour of this (after all, it is the *Big Brother* > database...) and not in favour of a request I've had in my BBDB folder > for quite some time now to make these into "proper" error messages. > > Sometimes, I wonder if it was a good thing to make BBDB easier to > setup and use :) >
Most people may never notice this, but there is a distinct possibility (one can never know an artist's intention completely) that Orwell was using Newspeak to poke at British Esperantists. Terminology such as adding -wise to all adverbs, use of un-, especially with ungood and unclose, has the ring of evangelistic british esperanto pedagogy of the 1940's -- and to top it off, the movement at that time attracted all sorts of eccentric characters such as "communists, socialists and vegetarians" ;-). Pretty ripe for ridicule. I happen to know Esperanto and I'm unhappy because think his jibes are unfair [puns intended], but Newspeak was a marvelous illustratation of the revisionist aspect of utopian schemes gone wrong. Ted -- Ted Stern Engineering Applications Cray Inc. http://www.cray.com 411 First Avenue South, Suite 600 206-701-2182 Seattle, WA 98104-2860 FAX: 206-701-2500 Debuggers' motto: Frango ut patefaciam -- I break in order to reveal ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
