Newspeak Routledge Revivals

George Orwell coined the term ‘Newspeak’ for his novel 1984, the purpose of which was designed to shrink vocabularies and eliminate subtlety and nuance. For this dictionary, first published to herald the year 1984, Jonathon Green compiled nearly 8, 000 entries – selected from the slangs and specific vocabularies of trades, professions and interests – covering such areas as the world of entertainment, the media, the military economics, and finance. This dictionary provides an accurate and useful linguistic guide for students of lexicography and an interesting compendium for the general inquisitive reader.

George Orwell coined the term ‘Newspeak’ for his novel 1984, the purpose of which was designed to shrink vocabularies and eliminate subtlety and nuance. For this dictionary, first published to herald the year 1984, Jonathon Green compiled nearly 8, 000 entries – selected from the slangs and specific vocabularies of trades, professions and interests – covering such areas as the world of entertainment, the media, the military economics, and finance. This dictionary provides an accurate and useful linguistic guide for students of lexicography and an interesting compendium for the general inquisitive reader.

First published in 1987, the Dictionary of Jargon expands on its predecessor Newspeak (Routledge Revivals, 2014) as an authoritative reference guide to specialist occupational slang, or jargon. Containing around 21, 000 entries, the dictionary encompasses a truly eclectic range of fields and includes extensive coverage of both British and U.S. jargon. Areas dealt with range from marketing to medicine, from advertising to artificial intelligence and from skiing to sociology. This is a fascinating resource for students of lexicography and professional lexicographers, as well as the general inquisitive reader.

When Albert Hunt joined the staff of the Regional College of Art, Bradford, in 1965, he found himself working mostly with ‘non-academic’ students on a fascinating range of games, projects and theatre events outside the main stream of exam-oriented education. In this title, first published in 1976, Albert Hunt describes this experience, and explains how he himself evolved from a conventional grammar school teacher to a radical and experimental educator. In particular, Hunt describes the evolution of new working relationships between teachers and students, which in turn highlight an alternative way of viewing society. Hopes for Great Happenings is not only a vividly interesting account of Albert Hunt’s teaching methods, but is of practical value to anybody involved in the study of liberal arts, theatre studies or in community arts work.

First published in 1986, the purpose of this dictionary is to clarify the technology behind nuclear jargon. The entries deal with all areas of nuclear warfare: its strategies and tactics, personnel and weapons systems, arms control and disarmament talks. The terminology of the nuclear age expands and changes as fast as the weapons and strategies it describes; the dictionary therefore covers a span ranging from the first tentative post-Hiroshima ideas and systems through to the near-fictions of the ‘Star Wars’ initiative. This fascinating reissue will be of particular value to those in need of a comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of nuclear warfare, as well as students of linguistics with a particular interest in slang and jargon.

First published in 1984, this biography gives an account of Jonathan Swift’s political ideas and provides a critical commentary on his major works. With its emphasis on Swift as a political writer, the title offers a revision of the prevailing view of Swift’s politics and its application in the study of his works. Alan Downie argues that in terms of the party politics of the day Swift is neither a Whig nor Tory. Swift thought of himself as an ‘Old Whig’, and said he was ‘of the old Whig principles, without the modern articles and refinements’. Downie shows how Swift’s writings consistently make political points about society’s deviation from an ideal. As Swift’s views on morality, religion and politics are so closely linked, an understanding of his political ideas is vital; this reissue provides a detailed analysis of this aspect of Swift’s writings and views, and as such will be of great interest to any students researching his satire.

Unashamedly polemical, this reissue of Freedom & Equality, first published in 1986, presents a strong and persuasively argued case for democratic socialism. In contrast to many recent books justifying conservatism and varieties of Marxism, Keith Dixon defends the two great principles underpinning democratic socialism – freedom and equality. He aims both to restore the idea of freedom to its proper place in the political vocabulary of the left and to defend a stark version of freedom as absence of constraint. Only this version of freedom, he argues, is consistent with the proper defence of civil liberties. Dixon also defends radical egalitarianism from its critics, who either repudiate its full force or reject it out of hand. He believes that freedom and equality are potentially realizable socialist goals, that democratic socialism is not necessarily linked with fraternalism, and – above all – that it should be based upon a firm and consistent conception of individuality.

First published in 1988, this title is a study of the essay as a literary genre, not just in terms of its general intellectual and literary history, but as an exploration of the creative possibilities of the form. The rise of the essay is discussed in relation to the rise of the novel and the emergence of empiricism in science, but the main focus of Graham Good’s study is on the inner workings of the essay itself. Drawing on criticism by Adorno and Lukacs, Graham Good presents the genre as an expression of individualism, freed from tradition and authority, in which the self constructs itself and its object through independent observation. Through analysis of the work of such essayists as Montaigne, Bacon, Virginia Wolf, T. S. Eliot and George Orwell, the potential of the genre for independence and individualism is illustrated, and the essay is resituated as an intellectually challenging form of creative and critical writing.