On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >> So you're saying that the word "abstract" should be removed from the > English language because it will never be needed?! >
> It's not a word that should be used, no. [...]. Platonists have no need > for such a term [...] I believe there exist words that are dangerously > misleading and this is one of them. It sound to me like you could get a job in the Ministry Of Truth in George Orwell's 1984, they were developing a new language called "Newspeak", this is what one of the ministry's experts on that language has to say about it as he explains it to the book's hero Winston Smith: "Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. [...] We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone." "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten [. . . . ] The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse r committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that." John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
