Language as the Ultimate Weapon

First of all, this entry will talk about an article from Jem Berkes named Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a Gorge Orwell’s novel that talks about Winston, a person who lives in Oceania, a fake country governed by the Party, a group led by Big Brother. All the people who lives in Oceania have to live under the Party rules and statements. Basically, it manipulates everything: history present and past, the language (Newspeak) and also everything about people’s lives.
The article I mentioned above describes how, in this case the Party, uses the language to manipulate everything. This was really interesting for me, because, as the author mentioned, changing the language was the main weapon to manipulate people. Newspeak is a language molded to reduce people’s capability to express themselves, so that they will finally think as the Party want them to. Also, this weapon is combined with the constantly changing of events in history, leading people to believe in everything that the Party states. I found something curious and is that we can relate this behavior to the politician’s arguments and every history record, maybe we have been manipulated all this time.
An important aspect I have to talk about on this entry is: Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?I think that as a programmer, we have to understand the importance and the power of language, because while programming, we are expressing ourselves and our thoughts about how we would solve a given problem. Also, each programming language’s syntax changes our way of thinking, because maybe it would be harder for us to express our thoughts in one language than in another one. I’ve realized that the language has a great power and taking advantage of it while programming or developing a programming language is something that we have to consider in order to do and achieve better things.

References: 
1.     Berkes, J. (2000). Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-four. Obtained from: http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/s201813/tc2006/language_ultimate_weapon.html


2.     Orwell, G. (1948). 1984. Australia: Adelaide. eBook obtained from: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/index.html

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