1984 #3

These two chapters in Orwell's 1984 were of particular interest to me. In chapter 5, the narrator describes a man named Syme, whom Winston speaks to in the lunch room. Syme was talking to Wilson about the Eleventh Edition, which is a dictionary. He says, "'We're getting the language into its final shape- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we're finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words...cutting the language down to the bone"" (Orwell 50). This quote shows that the government in the 1984 world wants everyone to be the same, and to conform to "their" idea of the perfect citizen. When Syme says "people like you", I assumed it was Winston's generation because Winston knew what the world was like before a totalitarian government took over.