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