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
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics
of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing
fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of
putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with
the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but
fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there,
imper