o/t - Death oƒ Prince Albert - 14 December 1861

quack like a duck?. Like various
other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning.
Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it
implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the
orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a
warm and valued compliment.



The C vocabulary. The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and
consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled
the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same
roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip
them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules
as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had
any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any
scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in
the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a
smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few
words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing
the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought,
irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for
?Science?, any meaning that it could possibly bear being already
sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the
expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh
impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude
kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example,
to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, 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
toget