12/8: Today in G-History

and ?bad? when applied to its enemies.
But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight
appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological
colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have
political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The
name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country,
or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the
familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the
smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original
derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records
Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the
Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was
called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of
saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century,
telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features
of political language; and it had b