We, the AFLM masthead, shall continue to blog about all the things you know and love about writing throughout the new year until the impending 2012 apocalypse. So, let's start at the beginning, get back to basics, and get to the real guts of the textual medium: language.
Some of you may have caught the reference in the title but I don't fault you if you didn't, it's been a while since high school. Newspeak is a fictional English dialect created in George Orwell's 1984 (which I'm currently rereading in order to write a curriculum) in order to oppress the masses. Hmm... that last sentence reads great without the parenthesis, it's almost ironic. Anyway, in high school the idea of Newspeak went totally over my head and quite frankly I probably didn't even read about it in the appendix. Newspeak is mostly an abridged form of English, words are given one meaning (meanings which support the tyrannical political party) in order to strip them of their poetic usage. In fact, in Orwell's 1984, personal writing is punishable by death.
The thought that the art of writing is a major determining factor of free will may sound like a lonely author's musings on his/her own self worth; however, Orwell has quite a point. There are inherent ideas and standards embedded inside languages that we simply pass over from day to day (the most obvious of which is probably the differentiation of feminine and masculine words, because of course, words are arbitrary and genderless). The language used on voting ballots across the country often use a certain diction to ensure that it is not accessible to certain demographics. But can language itself, by itself, stomp out the ability to think critically? Well, yes it can.
Grant Morrison, in his graphic novel series The Invisibles, offers a somewhat humorous parallel to Orwell's idea of linguistic oppression. Morrison (through his characters) claims that there are in fact more than 26 letters in the alphabet, but it was limited to 26 in order to limit the amount of ideas that could be created. Now, linguists know that even with 26 distinct phonetic letters a near infinite amount of words can be created. But the point is that a parallel was drawn between language and critical thinking. If you haven't read my blog on the confines of the ancient oral Greek mind, then please check it out, it's actually pretty relevant to the argument and a lot of fun (if you're into that kind of stuff).
Either way, I have another historical example to show here and now. So, the Japanese written language uses three different forms; Kanji (the logosyllabic system) and the two syllabaries called Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji and Hiragana are used to represent distinctly Japanese words and meanings; whereas Katakana is used to adapt new foreign words into the Japanese language. For years women were oppressed because they were only permitted to write in Hiragana. In other words, the new words (ideas) that were allowed into the Katakana syllabary could not be used by women (and thus, not expressed through writing). Even though Kanji words can be represented through Hiragana (and thus, the meaning too can be transferred), any reader of the text would be able to peg the writer as a woman and take action against her if he so pleased. In this case, the language was used to prevent revolutionary ideas and keep watch on an entire gender.
So what's the point of this rant? Read closely and write thoughtfully. We're all doing important stuff here and it's easy to forget how powerful something as commonplace as language can be. And the power of language in the form of art? Well... That's a story for another blog. Someone pick up the gauntlet!
-Rainamoinen
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