[john winston]

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 few
syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary
language.

The B words were in all cases compound wo