Newspeak for the Global Economy

[Lucky C]

English is difficult language to learn, so we need to carefully simplify it for use in our ever-growing global economy. Clarity and brevity are very important since we don't want to confuse non-native English speakers or low-skill native English speakers. The good news is that our evolution toward Newspeak seems to be going quite smoothly.

Many adjectives have already reached their saturation point. For example, "good" means average/mediocre whereas "awesome," "tremendous," "epic," "amazing," etc. all just mean great. This makes it much easier to choose the right word since they are usually interchangeable and not as distractingly impactful as they once were. More importantly, some of these words could easily drop out of usage, thereby simplifying vocabulary. If emphasis is needed, repetition of the word or phrase, or addition of words like "simply" or "very" can be used. E.g. "the ski trip was amazing. I can't wait to go again. Simply amazing." Emojis simplify further through repeated use of the "lit" fire emoji, the "100" emoji, etc.

Make sure you are succinct in anything you write for a broad audience. You don't want anyone to misinterpret your meaning in this day and age. It could cause them to press the wrong button on something, or even worse, be offended. Remember that sentences with more than a few words can be confusing and difficult to get through for many people. Don't ever use a confusing statement like "you must register before you can vote" when you can simply say "register to vote". This doesn't just go for broad audiences; make sure all work emails are short and to the point as well. Even if you have a big problem or question to convey, try to keep it to one sentence or less and avoid unnecessary words like "the".

Remember that niche words have very little everyday use. For example, within a technical sub-group of the global economy a word like "buffering" may still have some use, but Newspeak will simply replace it with the phrase "preparing video".

Be sure you have the latest version of Microsoft Office as it has built-in features to aid Newspeak adoption. The automatic Clarity and Conciseness checks continuously scan your document for words and phrases that would be unacceptable if you are producing a document for a multinational corporation. Word now makes it much easier to replace an accidentally typed complex word like "magnitude" with "size" or "in the event that" with "if".

We are well on our way to eliminating English's one problem keeping it from being the one true language of the world: complexity. If we can accomplish this, we can accomplish anything. From one world language, we will move on to one world currency, and soon one world government!

[jacob]

Hehehe ... and make sure to get one of these: https://www.igeeksblog.com/physical-emo ... -and-ipad/

Letters will probably be eliminated from the keyboard in the next version. Who needs them anyway.

[daylen]

Well written.

[Campitor]

At the cost of being the only dissenter here, in my experience managing some web content, there is a sizable user community who are stumped by simplicity. They require verbose instructions on what to do. My most recent example is when I published some URLs. I placed this brief statement on the page: "Please click the links below to access your desired site". The links were underneath that action statement. A fair number of users called in stating they didn't know what to do which left me gobsmacked. I actually had to place the following next to each link (click this link to access your site). This more than anything else cemented in my mind that some people are destined and determined to be left behind as technology becomes more sophisticated and pervasive.

[fiby41]

This is interesting to me in its relation to lexical semantics.

But I would like to challenge the presupposition than English, atleast in its present form, would be the lingua franca of this world. It's not ubiquitous to be a bridge language for many language-pairs where it is easier to translate from source to destination language without meaning being lost in translation during source-english-destination.*

Even today there are mutually unintelligible dialects (accents) of English within and across countries.
Proofs:
https://youtu.be/VDgUVov1SGI

We already have technology in which you point your camera at a signpost, banner and it is translated for you.

The futuristic solution would be real-time audio translation technology becoming more cheaper and wearable. Like the Babel fish in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The present solution in my country is, for example, when the President gives his annual address to the nation in English, there is a dedicated cabin than streams its translation for the members of legislature in almost real-time. The state borders were drawn up based on the languages spoken at the time of independence. There are 22 official languages.

*I can read the Cyrillic alphabet by now but cannot understand much of Russian yet. Still I've had live real-time detailed chats with about half a dozen Russians using solely translation tools and intuition for proofreading.

[Farm_or]

One world language, currency, order? I'm going to circumnavigate disproportionately aimlessly in a cave. (Hide)