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".. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away...His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck...
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know
it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words
that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse,
applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Originally posted by silent thunder
reply to post by okamitengu
But to me the most relevant aspect is the whole concept of doublethink: The way people can hold two totally contradictory sets of ideas in their mind and switch between them without thinking...plus newspeak, the type of language that supports it. Orwell's explication of this whole way of thought/speech was bang-on.