Various picking game query
 

which to an orthodox ear
merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by
reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas
inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and
could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned
whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in
fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately
translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are
equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which
All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a
grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth -- i.e. that all men
are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality
no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of
communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak
words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not
difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this,
but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse
would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language
would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of
'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free',
than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of
the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many
crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be