The goal of Newspeak in the dystopian novel 1984 is to try and limit what people are able to say, and what they are able to express through language. One example of this is the consolidation of adjectives used to represent quality. Things are not "great", "amazing", "atrocious", or "horrible" in Newspeak. They are "good" or "ungood", with modifiers "plus-" and "doubleplus-" to indicate extremes. That leaves six words to indicate the quality of everything. One aspect of language, any language, is that over time, words become nullified. George Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace in 1972 for saying a joke called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". One of the seven words being "piss" which has lost so much of the edge it had over the approximately 50 years since that it is uncensored in this high school essay. The more a word is used the less extreme it becomes. When you are limited to only six words to describe the quality of everything, including the government implementing this new language. If a person just called a particularly annoying day at their job "doubleplusungood", and then walking down the street a protester is somehow getting away with calling the entirety of the government the same thing, it is hard to take them seriously.

This compression of words is not just used to limit the tonality of words, but the use of words. In the appendix Orwell writes briefly about the word "oldthink" which has so many meanings it is pointless to use the word if one expects to be understood. Philosophy is a subject in which ideas have to be talked about in an incredibly specific manner in order to properly convey ideas without being misinterpreted. Confucius had as much of his philosophical thoughts preserved in writing through The Analects of Confucius. However, the book is written entirely in Traditional Chinese, which can be a problem, because the way the language is structured, a single character can have many meanings. In contradiction to the short form manner in which he delivers his philosophy, looking at a single proverb may as well be useless because some characters have meanings that allow it to be interpreted in contradictory meanings, making the whole proverb useless. It is only through hundreds of years of intense analysis are people able to probably guess the intended interpretation maybe, but to this day there are still contradicting narratives on his writings. Orwell never lists any of the many meanings of "oldthink", but just like Confucius, it is essentially worthless to try and guess the meaning just from a single conversation or article in the news that it essentially eliminates certain ideas that could be discussed.

A unique aspect to the grouping of words in Oceania is that the new terms come with a negative connotation, every single thing related to sex and sexuality the government did not like is all labeled under "sexcrime". Connotation is something people learn in school, it is a part of modern English. However, there is more to a word like "sexcrime" than connotation alone.

Bertrand Russel is another philosopher, who luckily wrote in English so his work is easier to understand, and his main theory was that words are essentially shorthand that represented a larger idea. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who unfortunately wrote in English, developed upon this idea, having proposed that the idea a word represents is based on how the word is used. Being "skinny" is generally seen as a positive trait in society, usually if someone calls another person skinny, it is a compliment representing the idea of a good weight or BMI as seen by the complimenter. However some people are anorexic, and calling them skinny is not usually a compliment, but rather an insult or a concern, both holding the idea of having too low of a weight, and also how the person using the word feels about the condition of the person they are using the word on. However, examining a word like "queer", which for about a century was a slur, it is apparent some words can have one idea they represent for a while, and the connotation of the word is culturally set in stone. Even to this day, some people do not like the use of the word because they grew up with it as a slur. Queer stood for LGBTQ+ when it was a slur and also now when it is not, the difference is that people have changed the culturally understood connotation of the word. When you look at a Newspeak term like "sexcrime", the word is designed in such a way that culturally it will only be used to represent a negative sexual thing. Culturally it can never be changed as doing so would also involve the broader culture changing how they use the word "crime" which is generally bad, especially when there is no way to express in Newspeak that laws and punishment are not necessarily moral because those ideas are hidden behind words like "crimethink" which requires changing the usage of itself to change the use of itself. It artificially uses language to eliminate the development of language and the meanings a word could possibly have.

All throughout this essay, real existing modern examples of the flaws in language that have harmful results have been used to show how Big Brother is using language to harm society, but what makes Newspeak any worse than any language that is used today. The key difference is that almost every language today is democratized. It is not a giant hyper-authoritarian government deciding how many words there are and limiting what can be said. If someone comes up with a new idea or invention, they name it. If people do not like the word they change it. If a word becomes so overused that it loses meaning, they find a new word. Oceania is using the quirks in democratized language, and then getting rid of the democracy limiting the thoughts people can imagine and the ideas they can express. In order to think that the government is unjust, so many barriers must be torn down one may not even have to be captured by the thought police as they would probably have to spend their entire natural life thinking about the words they speak in order to just scratch the surface of a complex language made on the grounds of "simplifying" English.