this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern "degeneracy") that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn't put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I mean saying it isn't as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn't as good as LeGuin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
The romantic sub-plot... That's a misunderstanding. It's a love triangle between Winston, Julia and Big Brother. It's not really a sub-plot at all.
But you're right. Le Guin runs rings around it.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it's important to read. It's one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it's about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It's just surveillance state stuff. That's a relatively small part of it though. It's more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that's not just cameras; it's also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it's the political bullshit itself. Something like "all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it." If what I'm saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I'm saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there's no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn't understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like "stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble". The last quote shows it
Quotes
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
i'm interested--further reading on this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I don't know if I missed it, but I don't think it's been disproven. I actually think it's true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handle different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some things, like calculus, significantly more difficult. It's much harder to do abstract math when you're mind is trained on concrete shapes.
There are two types of linguistic relativity: "strong" and "weak". Usually, when people simply say "linguistic relativity", they're talking about the strong view.
In the "strong" view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You'd be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell's times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that's where Newspeak comes from).
In the "weak" view, language doesn't dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It's probably true, but it's a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let's say there's some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it's just they'll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to "free beer" and "free software".)
Given how confused Americans are about "freedom," even the weak version isn't to be taken lightly
I think that's a different issue. Their childish and individualistic views over freedom don't seem to be caused by the word itself, or can mean both "costlessness" and "freedom". They look more like failure to notice freedom is a gradation (you can have more or less of it) instead of a binary (you either have it, or you don't).
I wonder if it isn't due to Cold War times propaganda. Something like "you either have freedom or you don't. We have it, our enemies don't."
They also seem to have a really hard time understanding the basic principle of civility, that sometimes one's freedoms enter in conflict with another's.
I'm sure the cold war plays a part, yeah. But the word itself has kind of become an empty signifier for generic "conservative American-ness" divorced from the actual meaning of the word. (See: referring to imperial measures as "Freedom Units")