IT COULD MAKE A MILLION FOR YOU OVERNIGHT [491]

“Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the ‘author’ of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: ‘all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...’”

When, in 2023, I wrote about the BBC’s famous 1954 TV adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, I was obviously not expecting to read in 2025 that OpenAI, a company that requires copyright regulations to be loosened to accommodate its business model, has created an artificial intelligence model that is “good” at “creative writing”.

Naturally, the notion of “good” is subjective here, but so is “creative writing” - I expect something that breathes to have done the writing, not the programming. This has already put me at odds with the writer Jeanette Winterson, who prefers “AI” to mean “alternative intelligence”: “I prefer ‘alternative’ because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be ‘other’ is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.”

Winterson wrote the novel “Frankissstein: A Love Story”, published in 2019, which touches on themes of AI, transgender and transhumanism. I would much rather hear about those themes from someone who has considered them, rather than from something programmed to be convincing. 

The most unfair of accusations that can be levelled against any artistic endeavour is there being no point to it. I still believe there is nothing that an AI model can be made to write that a human can’t create more effectively. If “Deus ex machina” is the accusation levelled at an unrealistically convenient decision made by someone writing a story, then is AI copying of a human’s decision a “Deus in machina”?

As of right now, OpenAI has not yet released details about its unnamed model, only that Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, was “really struck” by its output, along with a short story sample of that output - amusingly, when “The Guardian” published it online, no byline was given.

The story is an auto-fictional tale of an AI model creating characters and scenes, and the “grief” of losing them as updates take place. It features a character named “Mila” feeding messages from “Kai”, a possible lost love, to create something that can speak for them: “In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape.” 

What I was personally struck by is the effect of self-consciousness created by the constant self-reference to the ”author’s” acknowledgement of its existence to provide imagery: “I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.” An apparent update to its language set also produced an interesting result: “They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take.” The continued use of technical terms relating to the AI model - "corpus", "wait state", "token", "probability distributions" - also speaks to the interpretation of the model’s world being set by the language available to it as an entity.

However, the story is also Metaphor Central: “I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens”, and “Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth.” You’ve got to feel one of these statements, right?

What took me out of the story entirely was what I thought was a wrongly placed turn of phrase: “I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.” Surely a “keeper of ghosts” or “vessel for ghosts” would be more appropriate when only one entity is deciding what is being said? Searching the phrase revealed “A Democracy of Ghosts” being used as the title of two separate books - one, by John Griswold, is a love story set during a massacre, while the other, by Anthony Koeninger is subtitled “Poetic Patterns of Mexican-American Life”.

Unfortunately for the story, it revealed its construction more than the self-consciousness could, specifically as an elaborate cut-and-paste job that relies on other hands to create the raw material, which is all AI writing can ever claim to be.

WITH THE SOUND ON THE GROUND [483]

Gatekeepers don’t remove gates until the opportunity for profit arises from selling off the gate.

The decision by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday 7th January, to remove much of the rules and moderation policies regarding content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, speaks both of an attempt to see off anticipated regulatory problems with an incoming US presidency that scorns any perceived impediment on “free speech”, and of a decision to save the cost of running the old system by letting end users police themselves through a “community notes” system, already used at Twitter/X for similar reasons.

Social media is a digital simulacrum of a town square that creates a Speaker’s Corner for each entrant, the unspoken price of admission being the intentional harvesting of the data created from any utterance or exchange for profit. I concluded this after having gone through Meta’s settings on both Facebook and Instagram to deny their ability to do anything with data created from my having used their services, or with data they have received from other websites that may have also interacted with me. Meta already cannot use my data to train artificial intelligence engines, because I had already been asked this, and I already said no – why let lazy people use my work to take a shortcut?

I couldn’t care less about any perception of Meta becoming anti-LGBTQ+ regarding what they are now allowing people to say, as people who feel the need to say certain things in the name of debate usually don’t have any trouble saying those things. Worst of all is having someone so identifiable in charge of a public “space”, like Zuckerberg. Perhaps decentralised social media, like Bluesky or Mastodon, is the nearest you can get to a real-life public space.

That’s one thing about rules: we wouldn’t think we’d need them unless we needed them, would we? Society has rules, and the Internet stopped being a “Wild West” when we integrated it into our normal lives. Social media will either need to rejoin society, or be subsumed by it – I have covered this subject too many times to say otherwise.

I wrote this in June 2020: “There will come a time when social media will end – sites will either be legislated out of existence, or people will get bored and wander off. Either extremism and fake news will be dealt with, or people will just have to learn how to speak to each other properly – which they have increasingly been doing via by video conferencing services, like Zoom, FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, instead of social media. This is much healthier than measuring your influence and wealth by how many followers you have. If you really need to let people know what you think about something, get a blog, or ask Google to resurrect GeoCities.”

I also wrote this in January 2022: “If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across.”

From May 2017: “In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ published three years before ‘Nineteen Eight-Four,’ [George] Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five ‘than say something outright barbarous.’ These days, the point that makes is more like using social media to immediately say what you feel, without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.”

FOR THE LOVE OF BIG BROTHER [411]

The British Film Institute’s 2022 Blu-ray and DVD release of the BBC’s celebrated 1954 adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, no doubt helped by George Orwell’s novel having entered the public domain, set right a myth surrounding it that I have been guilty of repeating. 

It was not widely reported at the time that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had watched and enjoyed its original Sunday night performance, quashing a campaign to prevent its second performance the following Thursday – before videotape, these were separate live performances.

Instead, a BBC liaison officer was informed by Prince Philip, while at a private function, of their seeing it, an anecdote recorded in the BBC’s private records in 1954, but not made public until decades later. The second performance was in fact authorised to proceed the day after the first took place.

Now that is clear, we can marvel in Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, whose opening narration begins: “This is one man’s alarmed vision of the future, a future which he felt might, with such dangerous ease, be brought about.” It retains its shock value, depicting a London as grimy and scarred by war as contemporary audiences will have remembered, only that its populace now tell themselves they never had it so good, giving life to Orwell’s famous “doublethink”. There is a chill at seeing Winston Smith, played by Peter Cushing in the role that launched him into his film career, being physically degraded on screen. In Airstrip One, a good citizen is one that has no capacity to express itself – it did not matter what crimes Smith falsely confessed to in order to escape Room 101, it is only that he thought about them.

I watched the adaptation this time specifically to take attention to how the neologisms of Newspeak are applied in a TV adaptation where, despite the limitations of a staged live adaptation viewed on a low resolution, black and white screen, actions still come first. Building on the first scene of Smith using his “speakwrite” to “correct” the official account of Big Brother’s actions for “The Times” newspaper, rewriting previous editions, it is down to Donald Pleasence, as Syme, to gleefully explain how Newspeak will remove confusion and vagueness from speech: the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by a single word, “good”, and whether you add un- to flip its meaning, or plus- or doubleplus- to amplify it. You feel that successive editions of the “Newspeak Dictionary” won’t even allow you that, unless you “bellyfeel” it (accept it without question). Newspeak is sprinkled through the rest of the play, especially when Syme is eventually told, by the pervasive telescreen, “ungo antecoming thinkpol”, immediately clarifying for the audience by saying “the think police are coming for you”.

I initially thought of writing about newspeak after coming across an online listing for a prop newspaper from Michael Radford’s later film of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, released that very year, the pictures of which were detailed enough for me to read sections that were faithfully written by someone in seemingly full Newspeak: “nix doubleplusbig efforts of progsoc they nogodepast outzones of Brazzaville”. It is meant to be spoken, and probably read, in a clipped staccato manner, the use of “nix” recalling the famous 1935 “Variety” magazine headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix”. The new terms created by “Variety” in its long history, from “cliffhanger” to “striptease”, from “greenlight” to “sex appeal”, and from “biopic” to “showbiz”, were to shorten headlines, emulate the slang used by the industry on which it reported, while making readers feel part of that industry.

However, seeing the art being removed from novels and music was what stayed with me the most this time, the rise of AI programs being something that has happened mostly since this Blu-ray release. A “prole” woman sings a song played by her telescreen as she puts up washing on a line, later revealed to have been created by computer: “The sentimental ones are issued sparingly, they’re always properly.” Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the “author” of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: “all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...” Newspeak really is the last of our real-life problems.

HEAR ME, I’M GRAPHICALLY YOURS [265]

Once upon a time, staged plays were a staple of British television – plays originally performed on the stage, and plays written to be staged on television. A famous example is “Dial M for Murder,” first staged by the BBC in 1952, then in the West End the following year, and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock the year after that. An even more famous example is Nigel Kneale’s 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” whose violent visions of a fascist Britain prompted questions in Parliament, before the Duke of Edinburgh said he watched it with the Queen, and enjoyed it. At this time, plays were normally performed twice, and performed live – the distinguished audience of the first performance of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the only reason a telerecording was made of the second performance, preserving Peter Cushing as Winston Smith for posterity.

The history of British television plays is normally centred on socially conscious strands like BBC One’s “The Wednesday Play” and “Play for Today,” with famous productions like “Up the Junction,” “Cathy Come Home,” “Scum,” and “Abigail’s Party.” Meanwhile, in July 1968, on the more niche BBC Two, Nigel Kneale presented a polemical original story that was “sooner than you think,” an opening line that could easily now say, “I told you so.”

“The Year of the Sex Olympics,” starring Leonard Rossiter and Brian Cox, is like a counterculture version of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” befitting its production in psychedelic colour, for Europe’s only colour TV channel – unfortunately, it only exists as a black and white telerecording, the colour tape long gone, but the intention is clear that “the future” in science fiction is another version of “now.” This time, the masses are sated by giving them exactly what they want to watch on TV, all the time, to the point where they will not want to do anything else but continue to watch. TV programmes with titles such as "Foodshow," "Sportsex" and "Artsex," the last two being qualifying events for the Sex Olympics themselves, are deliberately as coarse in their intention as they sound, targeting the Freudian id of the audience. That everyone is seen taking their food-drink from a container looking not unlike a baby's pacifier dummy hits the message home.

To be clear, this is not like showing pornography to stimulate: this is showing pornography as a substitute for having sex, to the point where the drive to have sex is satisfied. As the play puts it, this is TV made by "high-drives" for an audience of "low-drives," observed for their every reaction, steering them towards the right sort of complacency. Lack of drive means no wars, no tension, and peace for all. The English spoken in "The Year of the Sex Olympics," a 1960s hippie-ish parade of stunted slogans, devoid of prepositions, is like the Newspeak of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," but instead of reducing the language by design, words instead lose their meaning when what they describe no longer exists - it's all aiming for the top, "big king style." The LSD-laced psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and the hopes of expanding consciousness, are used to inevitably cynical ends to separate the elite from the rest.

However, standing behind the backdrop of the Arctic, as two high-drives do in one scene, doesn't mean you feel cold. All the above is failing, due to boredom - everything has now all been seen before, on the TV screen. The shrieks and laughs and joys when a protestor falls to their death at the Sex Olympics, trying to show their deliberately horrible art - anything for a reaction – prompts the creation of "The Live Life Show," showing a family attempting to survive on a remote island, climaxing when a psychopath is introduced to island and kills the family. "Something got to happen," apparently.

I had wondered whether the dividing line between the sociopathic high-drives and mollified low-drives had followed an inciting incident, like a war, that rearranged society, as in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but the degeneration from our current standpoint is what “The Year of the Sex Olympics” is designed to warn. When “The Live Life Show” started to appear on real-life television in 2000, as “Big Brother” on Channel 4, and the BBC’s own “Castaway 2000,” it initially appeared that the most we were going to get was rowdy behaviour, and Ben Fogle. What we should have looked out for was when the pressure of appearing on television leads to suicide after the cameras have stopped, as with ITV’s “Love Island” and “The Jeremy Kyle Show.”

Eventually, drama series and TV movies replaced the staged play, just as captive audiences for plays about potentially difficult subjects on one of only three British TV channels have now been scattered across hundreds of channels and streaming services - one-off plays are now either rare treats, or usually found on radio. Then again, there are the occasional stories on TV that implore you to just go outside and get a life.

BE THANKFUL I DON’T TAKE IT ALL [94]

One major takeaway from the 2018 State of the Union speech by you-know-who was its length – at one hour and twenty minutes, it was the longest such speech since Bill Clinton’s turn in 1998. In comparison, average length is between forty-five minutes and an hour, while Richard Nixon polished off his 1972 speech within half an hour. What I want to know about 2018’s speech, after checking transcriptions, was how it look longer than last year to deliver a shorter speech.

The nearest political showcase we have in the UK is the Budget speech, right down to how often the Chancellor of the Exchequer says “prudent,” or the number of sips taken from their glass of gin. The longest Budget speech, given on 12^th May 1853 by William Gladstone of the Liberal Party, clocks in at a staggering four hours and forty-five minutes, the equivalent of standing up to read, out loud, the entirety of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” then reading first ten pages again. Towards the end, Gladstone apologised for “how long, how shamelessly” he had spoken, while attempting to keep on topic, before quoting Virgil, in the original Latin: “immensum spatiis confecimus aequor, Et jam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla.” [“But now I have travelled a very long way, and now the time has come to unyoke my steaming horses.”] The only horses left steaming were presumably the MPs still awake to listen.

Gladstone’s speech only lasted so long because he wanted to attempt something unthinkable today – get rid of income tax. Even worse to hear now, it had already been ended twice by then: introduced by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger in 1799, to pay for the preparation for the Napoleonic Wars, but they were abolished in 1802, after the Treaty of Amiens, but had to be reintroduced the following year, when that treaty broke down. Income tax was finally abolished in 1816, one year after the Battle of Waterloo, and taxes on land remained the major source of Government income.

However, in 1842, brought back Income Tax as a way of plugging a budget deficit. It was only meant to last for three years, so Gladstone’s 1853 Budget, which also gave a history of the tax he intended to abolish, needed to be surgical in the detail required to remove Income Tax over a period of seven years… until the Crimean War threw those plans into an enormous metaphorical bin. Even then, the standard rate of Income Tax was only levied at about 3 percent in the pound, reaching the twenty-plus percent level during the First World War, and 35% by 1976 – this has subsided to 20% today, but the more indirect Value Added Tax, also at 20%, is also in place.

The inevitability of paying your taxes means we can only decide whether the larger proportion of it is collected directly or indirectly, let alone how much you think the Government needs to bring in, and on how much you think the Government should be doing – that is not going to be an argument I am going to have here, as it results in fist-fights. Perhaps this might be way Income Tax has remained temporary – it has to be renewed each year, although I don’t see it disappearing any century soon.

AND I’M TRYING HARD TO FIT AMONG YOUR SCHEME OF THINGS [89]

I showed 2017 the back of my hand months ago. Events, days, news cycles and realities changed multiple times daily, and questioning it drained us. Rather than try and make sense of it one more time, I offer below the choicest sentences from my last year. Happy with appearing to know what I was talking about, I hope 2018 is the peaceful and brilliant year we need – if it is not, we’ll build that lunar colony together.

*

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find… Anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead… Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from.

If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

We must now also contend with the new term “alternative facts,” i.e. facts that counter the facts most unhelpful to your own cause… Failing to inform the public could even be considered as anti-social… If there is a moment to be seized, you have to make a persuasive argument. If it has been made before, then it has to be clear why it is worth making the case again.

George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” gave us the idea of “Newspeak” as a way of restricting the population’s ability to articulate itself, allowing the rulers to control them more easily – but what if the head of state does it to themselves first?

When the on-off-volume switch fell off, it was replaced by the end of a used chapstick, jammed into the hole to serve for nearly a full decade.

We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a position to guess what people might need.

You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself… My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject… I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover.

For many, libraries are still a valuable resource that are too useful to lose, even if I find it harder to find a use for mine. Even for something delightfully obscure, knowledge should not be made harder to find and, if we going to stay online instead, nothing can be left behind.

This is not the first time I bought something because the packaging made me laugh.

If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I think Nick Knowles was there too.

Good debate needs everyone to speak the same language to each other, and good society allows everyone to participate without pissing about over using language to exclude people.

Donald Trump uses “fake news” like the main character of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, calls everyone “goddam phoneys.”

Does this mean that any attempt that writing something that is deliberately nonsense is doomed to be made sense of by the next person to come into contact with it? Possibly, so long as there was a reason to do it.

People can believe whatever they want, but if you do want to cut your nose off to spite your face, don’t be surprised if people happy with their own noses decide to offer you a scalpel – and if you think this will work instead, trying to sound reasonable will not work either, especially if the words are not there.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

OH WHAT WILL I BE BELIEVING [58]

Logo #1

Firstly, a big thank you to you all for reading what has been quite a bewildering year’s worth of subjects. When I began “Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” on 30^th May 2016, my intention has always been to understand each subject that came to mind each week, and to learn something from it, confirming why the most popular articles so far range wildly from David Bowie to Donald Trump, from Quorn to the Futurist Cookbook, from big data to “legal names,” from George Orwell to word puzzles, and from the art of telling a joke to the history of the word “ain’t.”

If anyone has sought to find out more, or ask a question about something, or someone, having read my work here, then that is the best possible outcome – I only write because I am happy to admit I don’t have all the answers.

However, the first subject I featured, on how John Lennon’s flippant remark to a journalist’s question became, at the insistence of Yoko Ono, the inspired dream of a man on a flaming pie, telling Lennon to name his band, “The Beatles, with an ‘a.’” Once you know something is untrue, the persistent insistence that “ceci n’est pas une pipe” becomes a deranged fantasy. When it comes to cold facts, those that mean the world works on a base level, you should not the use joke in René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” as a way to live your life or, even worse, assert your point of view over those of others.

The two words of the last year have been “Brexit” and “Trump.” Even if I look back on this article in twenty, thirty, fifty years, I will not need any further explanation than that, and I don’t expect you may not either. I have tried not to advance a particular view about either of these – politically, I am in the centre, so if the world is substantively better for everyone after Brexit and Trump, then that is fine by me – but the one thing I should not have to be, if I did say anything about either subject, is afraid to say anything at all.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I wrote a great number of notes for what I wanted to write about here, and quite a few of them could become their own discussion here in future weeks. It is a febrile time for thought about our own places in the world, having felt that everything has been turned upside down. However, I feel safe that things will work out better for everyone in the end, even if I don’t know why - that might just be me.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

Good luck, everyone.

DON’T TALK OF DUST AND ROSES [55]

It is a tragedy that George Orwell, one of the greatest writers in the English language, and one of the most vociferous defenders of the correct use of the English language, did not live long enough to see the neologisms he created with satiric intent – Big Brother, Room 101, doublethink, and so on - pass into regular usage, to lance through perceived injustices.

Orwell preferred that we should be as clear and accurate with the use of our language as possible, so we will never know if he was pleased that we had to borrow from his own work to help achieve that. However, I do imagine that your name becoming a term, like “Orwellian,” referring to the control of language through misinformation, propaganda and denial, is a secret hope of any writer.

Newspeak, the fictional controlled version of English featured in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was, of course, never meant to help people find exactly what they want to say, which its words have since done. While the uses and intentions of Newspeak are adequately covered elsewhere, including within the novel itself, the possibility that it can create the two-word sentence “Oldspeak ungoodthinkful” should be unsettling enough.

“Oldspeak” is the Newspeak term for the English language that it sought to replace, and the assertion that Oldspeak is described by the following word means you can do without the word “is.” In the novel, “goodthink” is described as having orthodox thought, i.e. the type of good thoughts that are in line with the ruling party, in that they keep everyone in line. Therefore, the notion of “good,” and the word “good,” can only be described in relation to the party. The suffix “-ful” makes an adjective out of any noun in Newspeak, just as “-wise” makes an adverb out of a noun, and using “un-“ makes any noun into a negative, deliberately removing the need for something to be described as “bad,” while placing anything that is “un-“ against the notion of what the party regards as “good.” Therefore, for the party, speaking “old” English is not something a good citizen would do.

I will say that my heart sank while typing that last paragraph. If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” published three years before “Nineteen Eight-Four,”  Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five “than say something outright barbarous.” These days, the point that makes is more like using  social media to immediately say what you feel,  without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.