auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except
that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses
had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There
were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need
for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was
liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word:
occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were
inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need
made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great
an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear
later in this essay.

The B vocabulary. The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been
deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say,
which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended
to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a
full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use
these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into
Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually
demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain
overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole
ranges of ideas into a