29 April 2007

1984

'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. It isn't only the synonym; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contain its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.' (Orwell, 1949: 44)