Nevertheless, I have tried to choose words and concepts that should have some staying power, for a decade or two at least. I’m not sure that holds anymore in the world-wide ‘web’ of meaning we now inhabit (or are trapped in), with its exponentially increasing complexities. It used to be said that to name something is to begin understanding it. The rebirth of Cornish and other lost UK languages The ancient ‘viral memes’ still with us ![]() In the spirit of Orwell I offer a new speak for our new age, the century of ‘hyper’ and ‘virtual’ and ‘post’ this and that (how he would have laughed and cried at the idea of a ‘post-truth’!), where the struggle over meaning and authenticity have partly relocated to cyberspace, to a realm of infinite (im)possibility, just as our identities have. ![]() Looking back on this now, one is struck by how quaint his whole vision was, because in the age of the internet and super-connectivity, all of these things have been raised to sophisticated arts that, instead of being forced on us, have quietly colonised our lives. In George Orwell’s famous prognostication of the future (a dystopia, of course), what he calls ‘doublethink’ (cheerful violation of logic) and ‘newspeak’ (ideologically contorted language) run rampant, and all citizens are under heavy surveillance.
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