a couple of mouthfuls,
then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark
face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and
grown almost dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great
wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns
that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also
the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is
simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in
itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what
need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well --
better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again,
if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a
whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all
the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you
want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in
the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the
whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words --
in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It
was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention
of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme i