Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
a penal institution for political prisoners who are used as forced labor
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
the land mass formed by the continents of Europe and Asia
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
a person regarded as nonexistent and having no rights; a person whose existence is systematically ignored (especially for ideological or political reasons)
a large group of islands in the south Pacific including Melanesia and Micronesia and Polynesia (and sometimes Australasia and the Malay Archipelago)
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
a metric unit of capacity, formerly defined as the volume of one kilogram of pure water under standard conditions; now equal to 1,000 cubic centimeters (or approximately 1.75 pints)
an employee who mixes and serves alcoholic drinks at a bar
The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having
some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young
man with enormous forearms.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
a circular board of wood or cork used as the target in the game of darts
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and
from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room
that he expected the changes to have occurred.
It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of
information, which the ordinary Party member did not
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
a metric unit of weight equal to one thousandth of a kilogram
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of
the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for
a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the
swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant
facts were outside the r
unroll, unfold, or spread out or be unrolled, unfolded, or spread out from a furled state
Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of
the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and
racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance.
a man's hat with a tall crown; usually covered with silk or with beaver fur
You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a
frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was
called a top hat.
He knew that in the cubicle next
to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down,
Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but
some kind of dummy.
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
an occasion on which people can assemble for social interaction and entertainment
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
an area in a town that has been devastated by bombs
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for
a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the
swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant
facts were outside the r
From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and
continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime i
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
a room or building equipped with one or more toilets
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it
His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their
strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
g
the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances; guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
(of housing or residential areas) indicative of poverty
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
the highest part of the back at the base of the neck of various animals especially draft animals
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
a hole (as in the wall of a building) made by rats
He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes.
There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every
evening for the past four years.
Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on
the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk.
an aircraft without wings that obtains its lift from the rotation of overhead blades
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays, novel
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
a written document preserving knowledge of facts or events
But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one.
a collarless men's undergarment for the upper part of the body
Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for
a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually,
and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of
shorts that were lying across a chair.
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
the basic unit of length adopted under the Systeme International d'Unites (approximately 1.094 yards)
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and three
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
sports implement consisting of a stick used by hockey players to move the puck
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks
back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to
forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case.
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or mis
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes.
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging
a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
the act of taking possession of or power over something
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming
write down quickly without much attention to detail
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it
a fixed portion that is allotted (especially in times of scarcity)
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
make false by mutilation or addition; as of a message or story
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
And though,
of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this
was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness
of one's socks, the
Or perhaps--what was likeliest of
all--the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a
necessary part of the mechanics of government.
(military) a secret agent hired by a state to obtain information about its enemies or by a business to obtain industrial secrets from competitors
It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
the wetness of ground that is covered or soaked with water
He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy
pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
a circumscribed inflammatory and often suppurating lesion on the skin or an internal mucous surface resulting in necrosis of tissue
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated
jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal
purposes.
It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness.
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other r
a state that resembles sleep but that is induced by suggestion
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
detailed practical information about how something works or how something can be accomplished
In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.
The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having
some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young
man with enormous forearms.
composed of or covered with particles resembling meal in texture or consistency
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Or to bang his head against the wall,
to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any
violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was
tormenting him.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressi
He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs
and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and
resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of
Katharine's white bod
A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them,
spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few
individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt
was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology o
The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy
having or characterized by words of more than three syllables
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
walk a long way, as for pleasure or physical exercise
It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its st
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
The largest section of
the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,
consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all
copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded
a
sells food and personal items to personnel at an institution or school or camp etc.
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
make false by mutilation or addition; as of a message or story
And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the oth
a state lacking normal awareness of the self or environment
That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of
the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
a general name for alcoholic beverages made by fermenting a cereal (or mixture of cereals) flavored with hops
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty
quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,
filled up the horizon of their minds.
a sudden noisy expulsion of air from the lungs that clears the air passages; a common symptom of upper respiratory infection or bronchitis or pneumonia or tuberculosis
He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing.
a group of 21 volcanic islands in the North Atlantic between Iceland and the Shetland Islands
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
a thoroughfare (usually including sidewalks) that is lined with buildings
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays
He had
the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that
of Big Brother.
the flat part of a tool or weapon that (usually) has a cutting edge
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
an annual Eurasian plant cultivated in North America having showy heads of blue or purple or pink or white flowers
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it
was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
United States abolitionist and feminist who was freed from slavery and became a leading advocate of the abolition of slavery and for the rights of women (1797-1883)
A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked
the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim
that the quota had been overfulfilled.
a framework of metal bars used as a partition or a grate
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap
pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears.
a submersible warship usually armed with torpedoes
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actuall
On the
battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that
you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until
it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or
screaming with pain,
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
a fastener made by screwing a nut onto a threaded bolt
In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.
a mixture of lime or gypsum with sand and water; hardens into a smooth solid; used to cover walls and ceilings
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
uttering a loud inarticulate cry as of pain or excitement
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
a covering for the body (or parts of it) consisting of a dense growth of threadlike structures (as on the human head); helps to prevent heat loss
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
give a certain impression or have a certain outward aspect
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
a brittle transparent solid with irregular atomic structure
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
boxing equipment consisting of big and padded coverings for the fists of the fighters; worn for the sport of boxing
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
criminal falsification by making or altering an instrument with intent to defraud
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or
the spatial property possessed by an arrangement or position of things in a straight line or in parallel lines
But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one.
not capable of occurring or being accomplished or dealt with
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
in a simple manner; without extravagance or embellishment
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
being dexterous in the use of more than one set of muscle movements
And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the oth
The successful women, bumped and jostled by
the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
someone who lapses into previous undesirable patterns of behavior
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible
All history was
a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was
necessary.
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic agains
There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper
reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the mome
a material made of cellulose pulp derived mainly from wood or rags or certain grasses
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically.
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying to and f
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
a unit of time equal to 60 seconds or 1/60th of an hour
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
a category of things distinguished by some common characteristic or quality
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
worn or shabby from overuse or (of pages) from having corners turned down
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
an explosive device fused to explode under specific conditions
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
a mercantile establishment for the retail sale of goods or services
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women wh
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he
checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in
some way unorthodox.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
He knew that in the cubicle next
to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.
usually galvanized sheet iron or sheet steel shaped into straight parallel ridges and hollows
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against
thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the
atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the
heroes on the Malabar front--it ma
a pistol that will keep firing until the ammunition is gone or the trigger is released
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
an effigy (usually of a famous person) made of wax
It was a museum used for propaganda displays
of various kinds--scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
Or
again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official
forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the
fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan.
There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
a representation of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide; recorded by a camera on light-sensitive material
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
an adult person who is male (as opposed to a woman)
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or misquo
(comparative and superlative of `early') more early than; most early
He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form--'English Socialism',
that is to say--it had been current earlier.
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
The messages he had received referred to
articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought
necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.
Comrade Ogilvy, who had never
existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of
forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the
same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
having no or imperfectly developed or nonfunctional sex organs
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet
Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes--slum tenements, starving children, street
battles, capitalists in top hats--even on the barricades the capitalists
still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to
get back i
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
hear, usually without the knowledge of the speakers
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
prevent from being included or considered or accepted
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
perceive by sight or have the power to perceive by sight
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of
extraordinarily large in size or extent or amount or power or degree
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other pe
As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more,
so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had
suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
fine powdery material such as dry earth or pollen that can be blown about in the air
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs
and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and
resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of
Katharine's white body, froz
He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and
no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down
of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.
a sudden noisy expulsion of air from the lungs that clears the air passages; a common symptom of upper respiratory infection or bronchitis or pneumonia or tuberculosis
He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing.
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
undergarment worn next to the skin and under the outer garments
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, ho
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showe
Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impo
all of the points of the physical environment that can be perceived by a stable eye at a given moment
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes.
anything (such as a document or a phonograph record or a photograph) providing permanent evidence of or information about past events
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by
the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold int
negligent of neatness especially in dress and person; habitually dirty and unkempt
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
come into the possession of something concrete or abstract
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically.
a framework of wood or metal that contains a glass windowpane and is built into a wall or roof to admit light or air
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
brisk marching music suitable for troops marching in a military parade
By
careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that
was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by
lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling
had been driven out of th
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
a part that goes over or into the mouth of a person
Chapter 4
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the
telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started,
Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spe
chimney consisting of a metal pipe of large diameter that is used to connect a stove to a flue
You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a
frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was
called a top hat.
having a bosom as specified or having something likened to a bosom; usually used in compounds
How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even
predominate
His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died
loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and
because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a
conception of loyalty that was private and una
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great
purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all.
the act of assuming or maintaining a seated position
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
used to allude to the securities industry of the United States
Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
They were
born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married
at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part,
at sixty.
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which
Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading
his way across the room--a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a
froglike face.
It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness.
a small chin beard trimmed to a point; named for its resemblance to a goat's beard
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
Games impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
a stairway (set of steps) between one floor or landing and the next
The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight
of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers
were selling tired-looking vegetables.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
an entrance equipped with a hatch; especially a passageway between decks of a ship
It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.
a political party formed in Great Britain in 1900; characterized by the promotion of labor's interests and formerly the socialization of key industries
Of course 'e was referring to the Labour
Party, you understand.'
With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
a writing implement with a point from which ink flows
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed
passengers on a sinking ship.
abstaining from sexual relations (as because of religious vows)
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
beyond the top or upper surface or edge; forward from an upright position
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
utter in a loud voice; talk in a loud voice (usually denoting characteristic manner of speaking)
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of
'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his
pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old
market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster
of B.B.? Sneaked up behind
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
a channel along the eaves or on the roof; collects and carries away rainwater
They were
born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married
at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part,
at sixty.
(of actions or states) slightly short of or not quite accomplished; all but
But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down.
He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say
gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and
tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
(usually plural) loose-fitting nightclothes worn for sleeping or lounging; have a jacket top and trousers
Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for
a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually,
and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of
shorts that were lying across a chair.
a person who refrains from drinking intoxicating beverages
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
a quantifier that can be used with count nouns and is often preceded by `a'; a small but indefinite number
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
unusually great in size or amount or degree or especially extent or scope
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
an area of northern Africa between the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea
For
example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big
Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South
Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly
be launched in North Afr
confirmation that some fact or statement is true through the use of documentary evidence
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
used of skin roughened as a result of cold or exposure
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
flowing in drops; the formation and falling of drops of liquid
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
a change of position that does not entail a change of location
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
any of various small fasteners used to hold loose articles together
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
a place within a region identified relative to a center or reference location
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
be lying, be prostrate; be in a horizontal position
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
be conscious of a physical, mental, or emotional state
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
the social control of offenders through a system of imprisonment and rehabilitation and probation and parole
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
revolve quickly and repeatedly around one's own axis
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he
forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be
good for the back muscles)--the f
the outermost region of the sun's atmosphere; visible as a white halo during a solar eclipse
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
gossip (usually a mixture of truth and untruth) passed around by word of mouth
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
jump out from a hiding place and surprise (someone)
Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impo
short and thick; as e.g. having short legs and heavy musculature
It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic agains
speak (about unimportant matters) rapidly and incessantly
From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and
continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
not conscious; lacking awareness and the capacity for sensory perception as if asleep or dead
An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
inactivity resulting from lethargy and lack of vigor or energy
It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.
having attained a specific age; (`aged' is pronounced as one syllable)
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked
the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim
that the quota had been overfulfilled.
move with force, "He pushed the table into a corner"
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears.
That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent
lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first
time in several years.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
Or to bang his head against the wall,
to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any
violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was
tormenting him.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects
and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on
which he was authoritative and interesting.
insect having biting mouthparts and front wings modified to form horny covers overlying the membranous rear wings
On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small,
curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes
darting suspicious glances from side to side.
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
the organ of smell and entrance to the respiratory tract; the prominent part of the face of man or other mammals
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
call to remembrance; keep alive the memory of someone or something, as in a ceremony
There were occasions when Big
Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble,
rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed.
a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals
who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed,
were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
ye
But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
a piece of furniture that provides a place to sleep
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically.
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
any of those hardwood trees of the genus Dalbergia that yield rosewood--valuable cabinet woods of a dark red or purplish color streaked and variegated with black
The old
man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite
the bed.
the 3rd largest ocean; bounded by Africa on the west, Asia on the north, Australia on the east and merging with the Antarctic Ocean to the south
Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impo
She must have
followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
bob forward and under so as to feed off the bottom of a body of water
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verified existence; not illusory
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
the cardinal number that is the sum of nineteen and one
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
one of the four basic taste sensations; like the taste of vinegar or lemons
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.
hosiery consisting of a cloth covering for the foot; worn inside the shoe; reaches to between the ankle and the knee
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, ho
of the color intermediate between green and violet; having a color similar to that of a clear unclouded sky
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
the capital and largest city of England; located on the Thames in southeastern England; financial and industrial and cultural center
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
any of several small trees and shrubs native to the tropical Old World yielding coffee beans
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
a thing made to be similar or identical to another thing
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube.
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the back
thorny Eurasian shrub of small tree having dense clusters of white to scarlet flowers followed by deep red berries; established as an escape in eastern North America
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
eager to investigate and learn or learn more (sometimes about others' concerns)
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy
correspondence in the sounds of two or more lines (especially final sounds)
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them,
spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few
individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt
was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology o
walk heavily and firmly, as when weary, or through mud
Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging
a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging
a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women wh
subsequently or soon afterward (often used as sentence connectors)
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
It was curious, but when you said it to yourself
you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London
that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.
be afloat either on or below a liquid surface and not sink to the bottom
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
a calculator that keeps a record of the number of times something happens
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actuall
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
a very short time (as the time it takes the eye to blink or the heart to beat)
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
throw, catch, and keep in the air several things simultaneously
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
a seat for one person, with a support for the back
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
a humorous or satirical drawing published in a newspaper or magazine
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even
predominate
A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, scr
The successful women, bumped and jostled by
the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
a local and habitual twitching especially in the face
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of
having something to hide.
having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination
BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston's own.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from
his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing
fit.
any of various trees of the genus Ulmus: important timber or shade trees
In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense
masses like women's hair.
mended usually clumsily by covering a hole with a patch
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
a game played on an ice rink by two opposing teams of six skaters each who try to knock a flat round puck into the opponents' goal with angled sticks
It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
(comparative of `much' used with mass nouns) a quantifier meaning greater in size or amount or extent or degree
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
an optical toy in a tube; it produces symmetrical patterns as bits of colored glass are reflected by mirrors
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of kal
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
the emotion of intense dislike; a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action
He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia
or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was
generally at peace with the other.
the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, h
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actuall
At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
an emotion experienced in anticipation of some specific pain or danger (usually accompanied by a desire to flee or fight)
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
a temporary state in which you are unable (or unwilling) to sleep
On the
battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that
you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until
it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or
screaming with pain, life is
your basis for belief or disbelief; knowledge on which to base belief
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
regard with feelings of respect and reverence; consider hallowed or exalted or be in awe of
He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of
information, which the ordinary Party member did not
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in.
the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage
'Has it ever
occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a
single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation
as we are having now?'
the fraudulent appropriation of funds or property entrusted to your care but actually owned by someone else
They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the
enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various
trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother
which had started long before t
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party.
And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the oth
primarily spatial sense; of relatively great or greater than average spatial extension or extension as specified
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears.
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women wh
They were down in some subterranean
place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it
was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
the cardinal number that is the sum of six and one
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
a piece of information about circumstances that exist or events that have occurred
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
one thousand grams; the basic unit of mass adopted under the Systeme International d'Unites
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet
everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to
be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the
crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody
free from error; especially conforming to fact or truth
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by
the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold int
the act of adjusting an organ pipe (or wind instrument) so that it conforms to the standards of tone and pitch and color
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and
paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which hi
The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them.
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
having a surface without slope, tilt in which no part is higher or lower than another
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of
thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects
and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on
which he was authoritative and interesting.
an exercise device consisting of an endless belt on which a person can walk or jog without changing place
There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the
pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's
Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
an area that is approximately central within some larger region
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
an abnormal physical condition resulting from defective genes or developmental deficiencies
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of
having something to hide.
a repetitive song in which as many syllables as necessary are assigned to a single tone
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
acting with or marked by or resulting from great force or energy or emotional intensity
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one
wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
the physical universe considered as an orderly system subject to natural (not human or supernatural) laws
And though,
of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this
was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness
of one's socks, the
On the
battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that
you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until
it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or
screaming with pain,
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not
to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of
the door.
someone who commits crimes for profit (especially one who obtains money by fraud or extortion)
There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance.
droop, sink, or settle from or as if from pressure or loss of tautness
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
Or to bang his head against the wall,
to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any
violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was
tormenting him.
(sometimes followed by `of') having or showing knowledge or understanding or realization or perception
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the
hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen.
And the Ministry had not only to
supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole
operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat.
general term for any insect or similar creeping or crawling invertebrate
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Big Brother's Order for the
Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an
organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts
to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses.
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth,
wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper
during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into
the dim period of his early childhood.
the act of sexual procreation between a man and a woman; the man's penis is inserted into the woman's vagina and excited until orgasm and ejaculation occur
Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting
minor operation, like having an enema.
examine carefully for accuracy with the intent of verification
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
having a robust muscular body-build characterized by predominance of structures (bone and muscle and connective tissue) developed from the embryonic mesodermal layer
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and
racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionl
There were occasions when Big
Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble,
rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
a farm building for housing horses or other livestock
When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed
passengers on a sinking ship.
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically.
After confessing to
these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given
posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important.
There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the mome
It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionl
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been
at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of
peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air
raid which appeared to t
(usually followed by `of') having capacity or ability
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
become settled or established and stable in one's residence or life style
When the Hate was over he returned
to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the
speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his
main job of the morning.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionl
Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of
the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
extremely harmful; bringing physical or financial ruin
He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it
was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
support by placing against something solid or rigid
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
being of the achromatic color of maximum darkness; having little or no hue owing to absorption of almost all incident light
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
bring back into original existence, use, function, or position
After confessing to
these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given
posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important.
easily squashed; resembling a sponge in having soft porous texture and compressibility
He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy
pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women wh
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
blame for, make a claim of wrongdoing or misbehavior against
But--though this was one
of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed
to--it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-f
contented to a fault with oneself or one's actions
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically.
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
a small pocketknife; originally used to cut quill pens
In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.
take the first step or steps in carrying out an action
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
abstaining from sexual relations (as because of religious vows)
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet sash, a
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
footwear (shoes or slippers) with no heel (or a very low heel)
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
either of the two large fleshy masses of muscular tissue that form the human rump
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from
his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing
fit.
the practical world as opposed to the academic world
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
an impure form of quartz consisting of banded chalcedony; used as a gemstone and for making mortars and pestles
Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might
include something interesting.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
cause to be in a certain state; cause to be in a certain relation
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one.
either of the two categories (male or female) into which most organisms are divided
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
a man's coat having knee-length skirts front and back; worn in the 19th century
You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was
called a top hat.
a swinging or sliding barrier that will close the entrance to a room or building or vehicle
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
a daily or weekly publication on folded sheets; contains news and articles and advertisements
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and four
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
a gliding joint between the distal ends of the tibia and fibula and the proximal end of the talus
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
something that is a counterfeit; not what it seems to be
There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being scra
the cardinal number that is the sum of eight and one
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
a public statement containing information about an event that has happened or is going to happen
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
pertaining to biology or to life and living things
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays, novel
There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there.
a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters
Statistics were just as much
a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole gu
furnishings that make a room or other area ready for occupancy
As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity.
That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first
time in several years.
To the right of the
speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a
larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of
Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.
The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals
who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed,
were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
ye
shaped into alternating parallel grooves and ridges
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
the cardinal number that is the sum of ten and one
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
(comparative of `good') superior to another (of the same class or set or kind) in excellence or quality or desirability or suitability; more highly skilled than another
Better than before,
moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of
a shelf beside an open fire where something can be kept warm
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in
a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in
the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with
nobody watching you, no voice pursuing
without qualification; used informally as (often pejorative) intensifiers
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated
jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal
purposes.
It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon
you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to
deny the evidence of your senses.
of textures that are rough to the touch or substances consisting of relatively large particles
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
throwing and catching several objects simultaneously
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one.
At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.
But there was a fraction of a second when
their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he
KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
a civil right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
a band of material around the waist that strengthens a skirt or trousers
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
But--though this was one
of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed
to--it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its paren
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by
the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold int
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even
predominate
established beyond doubt or question; definitely known
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against
thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the
heroes on the Malabar front--it ma
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
There was a sort of
calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent
lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first
time in several years.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
(physics) electromagnetic radiation that can produce a visual sensation
But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
an association of states or organizations or individuals for common action
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
permitting the unwanted passage of fluids or gases
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
containing or made of or resembling or characteristic of a metal
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he
forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were
gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be
good for the back muscles)--the f
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their
strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
g
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
a narrow marking of a different color or texture from the background
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and
thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a
victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth
Three-Year Plan, might complicate the
food made from dough of flour or meal and usually raised with yeast or baking powder and then baked
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party.
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
the act of making something (a product) from raw materials
So tricky a piece
of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand,
to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place.
The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals
who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed,
were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
ye
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
The Party claimed,
for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before
the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent.
a wooden instrument of punishment on a post with holes for the wrists and neck; offenders were locked in and so exposed to public scorn
There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's
Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
a mixture of gases (especially oxygen) required for breathing; the stuff that the wind consists of
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
(often used as a combining form) in a good or proper or satisfactory manner or to a high standard (`good' is a nonstandard dialectal variant for `well')
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
headdress that protects the head from bad weather; has shaped crown and usually a brim
His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their
strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
g
clothing of distinctive design worn by members of a particular group as a means of identification
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
a structure consisting of something wound in a continuous series of loops
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing
spectacles.
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic agains
a negotiable certificate that can be detached and redeemed as needed
Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for
a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually,
and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of
shorts that were lying across a chair.
destruction achieved by causing something to be wrecked or ruined
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
either side of the body below the waist and above the thigh
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
a black resinous substance obtained from certain trees and used as a natural varnish
Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might
include something interesting.
His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact
that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air
of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or
perhaps a musician.
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
having ears (or appendages resembling ears) or having ears of a specified kind; often used in combination
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its st
the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
mechanical vibrations transmitted by an elastic medium
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects
and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on
which he was authoritative and interesting.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the back
a district of a city marked by poverty and inferior living conditions
Always they were a
rehashing of the ancient themes--slum tenements, starving children, street
battles, capitalists in top hats--even on the barricades the capitalists
still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to
get back i
a group of people living in a particular local area
It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might
include something interesting.
In any case, to wear an improper expression on
your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example)
was itself a punishable offence.
creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire
There was even
a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in
producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed
packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it,
was permitted to look a
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing
spectacles.
an alert cognitive state in which you are aware of yourself and your situation
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
an item of information that is typical of a class or group
They were down in some subterranean
place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it
was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say
gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and
tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of human tasks
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and
began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military
and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then
promptly answering them ('What les
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
a relation between things or events (as in the case of one causing the other or sharing features with it)
Most of the material that you were dealing
with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of
connexion that is contained in a direct lie.
An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic agains
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by
the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold int
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
a rigid piece of metal or wood; usually used as a fastening or obstruction or weapon
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature.
move in order to make room for someone for something
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
any of several small gregarious cetacean mammals having a blunt snout and many teeth
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen.
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
bowed stringed instrument that is the highest member of the violin family; this instrument has four strings and a hollow body and an unfretted fingerboard and is played with a bow
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the
angle-joint.
a cleansing agent made from the salts of vegetable or animal fats
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
blindly and obstinately attached to some creed or opinion and intolerant toward others
It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects
and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on
which he was authoritative and interesting.
There were streaks of white in her hair; but the
truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open,
revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness.
From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and
continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying to and f
There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there.
a small fragment of something broken off from the whole
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current
an individual 3-dimensional object that has mass and that is distinguishable from other objects
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
any number of entities (members) considered as a unit
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other
people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above
the other.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and
from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room
that he expected the changes to have occurred.
the latter part of the day (the period of decreasing daylight from late afternoon until nightfall)
He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
pass gradually or leak through or as if through small openings
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying t
a pseudoscience claiming divination by the positions of the planets and sun and moon
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of
He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that o
Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
cause to die; put to death, usually intentionally or knowingly
A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, scr
By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast.
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
the cardinal number that is the sum of four and one
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
an event (or the result of an event) that completely destroys something
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current
an expression consisting of one or more words forming a grammatical constituent of a sentence
And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its paren
a structure consisting of a room or set of rooms at a single position along a vertical scale
He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features.
a level of material comfort in terms of goods and services available to someone or some group
Returns now
completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past
year.
Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today
had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that they
lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger,
happier, more
the trace of a point whose direction of motion changes
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
demand as being one's due or property; assert one's right or title to
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
of or associated with or requiring the use of the mind
It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic
dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which
one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable
after one is awake.
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which
With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the
steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did
not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of
chimney-pots.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showe
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
an arrangement of objects or people side by side in a line
Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room.
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
said or done without having been planned or written in advance
At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous
the power to entice or attract through personal charm
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
(physics) the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force
He thought with a kind of
astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery
of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is needed.
assert or affirm strongly; state to be true or existing
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
the anxiety you experience when you feel vulnerable and insecure
It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness.
The largest section of
the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,
consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all
copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded
a
His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their
strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
g
based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
a low continuous indistinct sound; often accompanied by movement of the lips without the production of articulate speech
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of
having something to hide.
very sad; especially involving grief or death or destruction
The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his
mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in
a way that was no longer possible.
used of milk and milk products from which the cream has been removed
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
to a complete degree or to the full or entire extent (`whole' is often used informally for `wholly')
It was absurd, since the
writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial
act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the
spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
a female person who has the same parents as another person
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
be larger in number, quantity, power, status or importance
How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even predominated
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the
appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid out of the pneumatic tube
after only a few minutes' delay.
a fervent and even militant proponent of something
Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-f
It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or
As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its st
a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially a political plot)
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
a learning process in which an organism's behavior becomes dependent on the occurrence of a stimulus in its environment
By
careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that
was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by
lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling
had been driven out of th
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays, novel
act of extending over a wider scope or expanse of space or time
A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few
individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt
was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology o
a solid food prepared from the pressed curd of milk
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
do one's shopping at; do business with; be a customer or client of
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bought
At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had
been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Airstrip One,
for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called
England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
retardation more severe than a moron but not as severe as an idiot
She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan,
and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of
swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him.
binary compound that occurs at room temperature as a clear colorless odorless tasteless liquid; freezes into ice below 0 degrees centigrade and boils above 100 degrees centigrade; widely used as a solvent
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impo
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying t
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
athletic facility equipped for sports or physical training
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
reduce or cause to be reduced from a solid to a liquid state, usually by heating
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actuall
Or again, if you
want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the
rest of them?
the act of offering an improvement to replace a mistake; setting right
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube.
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or
They had flown from a secret airfield
in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important
military secrets.
a strong sea boat designed to rescue people from a sinking ship
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing
spectacles.
It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
It
was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but
the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral
memory.
explore, often with the goal of finding something or somebody
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not
to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of
the door.
You remembered huge events which had quite probably not
happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing.
It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon
you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to
deny the evidence of your senses.
And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this
version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes
of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie
would pass into the permanent record
a support that consists of a horizontal surface for holding objects
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
The ideal set up by the
Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel
and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of
warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the
same thoughts a
in a manner or order or direction the reverse of normal
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually flinc
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
move obliquely or sideways, usually in an uncontrolled manner
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable.
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the
ge
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature.
a social class comprising those who do manual labor or work for wages
And the Ministry had not only to
supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole
operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat.
Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet
everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to
be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the
crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody
a cushion-like device that reduces shock due to an impact
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in
a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in
the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with
nobody watching you, no voice pursuing
a person who holds religious beliefs in conflict with the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole gu
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the
impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise
restored it somewhat.
They threaded
their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the
metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew,
a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit.
formalwear consisting of full evening dress for men
There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the
pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's
Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
suitable for a particular person or place or condition etc
Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-fashione
a product produced or accomplished through the effort or activity or agency of a person or thing
So tricky a piece
of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand,
to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of
fabrication was taking place.
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying
the narrowing of the body between the ribs and hips
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
resembling a fork; divided or separated into two branches
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women wh
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap
pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears.
lacking special distinction, rank, or status; commonly encountered
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
footwear shaped to fit the foot (below the ankle) with a flexible upper of leather or plastic and a sole and heel of heavier material
His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing
spectacles.
the time and process of budding and unfolding of blossoms
They were
born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married
at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part,
at sixty.
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party.
the hollow muscular organ located behind the sternum and between the lungs; its rhythmic contractions move the blood through the body
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole gu
refuse to acknowledge, ratify, or recognize as valid
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its st
mustelid of northern hemisphere in its white winter coat
There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the
pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's
Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died
loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and
because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a
conception of loyalty that was private and
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the
huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it
is now?' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.
a person who has achieved distinction and honor in some field
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
an intricate trap that entangles or ensnares its victim
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been
at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of
peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to t
go outside a room or building for a short period of time
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not
to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of
the door.
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic agains
As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its st
For
example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big
Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South
Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly
be launched in North
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves.
a show or display; the act of presenting something to sight or view
At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous demo
any movable possession (especially articles of clothing)
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
a plant consisting of one or more buildings with facilities for manufacturing
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and
paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which hi
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party.
And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its paren
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason
A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, scr
the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the back
But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to
That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent
lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first
time in several years.
without speed (`slow' is sometimes used informally for `slowly')
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way.
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one
wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him.
(biology) the process of decay caused by bacterial or fungal action
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or
With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture,
a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid
movement of the arm.
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might
include something interesting.
anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, ho
(superlative of `many' used with count nouns and often preceded by `the') quantifier meaning the greatest in number
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
having or displaying qualities appropriate for heroes
Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready
made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently
died in battle, in heroic circumstances.
so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period
The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being
military officers assigned to assist a senior officer in planning military policy
They had flown from a secret airfield
in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important
military secrets.
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
the spatial property resulting from a relatively small distance
Chapter 4
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the
telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started,
Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its
mouthpiece, and put on his spe
a light, self-propelled movement upwards or forwards
People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
A young
woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with
everything that he said.
The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy
He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of
thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
someone who travels about selling his wares (as on the streets or at carnivals)
There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and
racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance.
any number of entities (members) considered as a unit
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
a protective covering that covers or forms the top of a building
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping
he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything
that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself,
was always slightly dangerous.
English physician who first described Down's syndrome (1828-1896)
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime i
The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them.
As Winston stood watching, it
occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had
already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expr
inborn pattern of behavior often responsive to specific stimuli
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed
an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain
that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked.
Comrade Ogilvy, who had never
existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of
forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the
same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
About five years after
this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment
of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then
forgott
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
make clear by removing impurities or solids, as by heating
But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and
paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which hi
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground
But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
small wild or domesticated web-footed broad-billed swimming bird usually having a depressed body and short legs
From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and
continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
of relatively small extent from one surface to the opposite or in cross section
It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
wa
pass into or through, often by overcoming resistance
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
having or feeling no doubt or uncertainty; confident and assured
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
unmistakably (`plain' is often used informally for `plainly')
It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was
only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual.
Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated
jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal
purposes.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that o
Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room.
And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to tw
move through a space, circuit or system, returning to the starting point
There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there.
But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the
hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen.
having or marked by a curve or smoothly rounded bend
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight.
He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every
evening for the past four years.
humble in spirit or manner; suggesting retiring mildness or even cowed submissiveness
And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems
In the corresponding cubicle on the other
side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working
steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close
to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in t
He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say
gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and
tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
Scottish economist who advocated private enterprise and free trade (1723-1790)
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and
paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which hi
rubbish carelessly dropped or left about (especially in public places)
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
They threaded
their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the
metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew,
a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he
forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were
gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be
good for the back muscles)--the f
any of numerous deciduous trees and shrubs of the genus Salix
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicke
street that serves as a principal thoroughfare for traffic in a town
The alley led out into the main street, and down the next
turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the
blank book which was now his diary.
a flat device with narrow pointed teeth on one edge; disentangles or arranges hair
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper
reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the mome
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
athletic facility equipped for sports or physical training
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
All that was needed was to
substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be
necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
a metal pot for stewing or boiling; usually has a lid
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in
a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in
the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with
nobody watching you, no voice pursuing
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grim
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the
telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started,
Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its
mouthpiece, and put on his spe
So tricky a piece
of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand,
to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of
fabrication was taking place.
lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness
It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry
home, unless it were taken out of its frame.
an abstract or general idea inferred or derived from specific instances
Every concept that
can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
the act of revising or altering (involving reconsideration and modification)
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
a longing for something better than the present situation
And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes
did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas,
they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
the pursuit (of a person or animal) by following tracks or marks they left behind
He knew that in the cubicle next
to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania.
Just
once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of
Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece,
like a line of type cast solid.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, h
Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
an enclosed chamber in which heat is produced to heat buildings, destroy refuse, smelt or refine ores, etc.
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of war
an ambiguity (especially one in the text of a law or contract) that makes it possible to evade a difficulty or obligation
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,
with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a
fortress.
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses fa
a glass or plastic vessel used for storing drinks or other liquids; typically cylindrical without handles and with a narrow neck that can be plugged or capped
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helple
On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
concerned with concrete problems or data rather than with fundamental principles
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
the pedal extremity of vertebrates other than human beings
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the back
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying t
In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense
masses like women's hair.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed
passengers on a sinking ship.
prohibited by law or by official or accepted rules
This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
a natural protective body covering and site of the sense of touch
His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
run away; usually includes taking something or somebody along
The successful women, bumped and jostled by
the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses fa
take a short break from one's activities in order to relax
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
highly attractive and able to arouse hope or desire
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardi
At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that o
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime i
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it.
Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impo
He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy
pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable.
a soft greasy substance occurring in organic tissue and consisting of a mixture of lipids (mostly triglycerides)
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and
that part of the central nervous system that includes all the higher nervous centers; enclosed within the skull; continuous with the spinal cord
And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the oth
Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
specialized technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject
Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal
purposes.
Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or
make dirty or spotty, as by exposure to air; also used metaphorically
In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showe
requiring more than usually expected or thought due; especially great patience and effort and skill
He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging
a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actuall
Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in.
the work of providing treatment for or attending to someone or something
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
European weed naturalized in southwestern United States and Mexico having reddish decumbent stems with small fernlike leaves and small deep reddish-lavender flowers followed by slender fruits that stick straight up; often grown for forage
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
(superlative of `near' or `close') within the shortest distance
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current
People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
one of several distinct subdivisions of a text intended to separate ideas; the beginning is usually marked by a new indented line
And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its paren
(used with count nouns) of an indefinite number more than 2 or 3 but not many
The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
an assistant subject to the authority or control of another
At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the back
put into service; make work or employ for a particular purpose or for its inherent or natural purpose
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
a succession of notes forming a distinctive sequence
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
of or pertaining to or characteristic of an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any po
a particular course of action intended to achieve a result
To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic
Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activi
queen of the Olympian gods in ancient Greek mythology; sister and wife of Zeus remembered for her jealously of the many mortal women Zeus fell in love with; identified with Roman Juno
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
a vehicle carrying many passengers; used for public transport
On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered
off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again,
losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which
direction he was going.
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
But in among all
this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses
that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look
after them.
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet
the act of putting something in working order again
Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
contort the face to indicate a certain mental or emotional state
A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, scr
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually fl
There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense
masses like women's hair.
the extreme end of something; especially something pointed
With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the se
He did not remember the raid
itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they
hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round
a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied
his
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable.
He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as do
In any case, to wear an improper expression on
your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example)
was itself a punishable offence.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities
An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been
at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of
peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air
raid which appeared to t
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
(comparative of `little' usually used with mass nouns) a quantifier meaning not as great in amount or degree
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other pe
fail to keep or to maintain; cease to have, either physically or in an abstract sense
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
a joint between the distal end of the radius and the proximal row of carpal bones
At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over.
The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having
some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young
man with enormous forearms.
On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small,
curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes
darting suspicious glances from side to side.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays
Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
a compound made artificially by chemical reactions
In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses fa
a situation from which extrication is difficult especially an unpleasant or trying one
Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
published writings in a particular style on a particular subject
This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole gu
having or covered with protective barbs or quills or spines or thorns or setae etc.
It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
remove something concrete, as by lifting, pushing, or taking off, or remove something abstract
Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which hi
Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
impossible to avoid or evade:"inescapable conclusion"
There was no reproach
either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they
must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of
the unavoidable order of things.
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the
appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid out of the pneumatic tube
after only a few minutes' delay.
Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
ice crystals forming a white deposit (especially on objects outside)
The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy
Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
Or
again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official
forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the
fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan.
He thought with a kind of
astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery
of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is needed.
That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of
the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
set down according to a plan:"a carefully laid table with places set for four people"
He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
a piece of furniture with a writing surface and usually drawers or other compartments
Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of
the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
She must have
followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
a political party formed in Great Britain in 1900; characterized by the promotion of labor's interests and formerly the socialization of key industries
Of course 'e was referring to the Labour
Party, you understand.'
having lost your bearings; confused as to time or place or personal identity
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
be present at (meetings, church services, university), etc.
He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not
to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of
the door.
a miniature whirlpool or whirlwind resulting when the current of a fluid doubles back on itself
Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere.
Every concept that
can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
When the Hate was over he returned
to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the
speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his
main job of the morning.
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and
began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military
and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then
promptly answering them ('What les
metal or earthenware cooking vessel that is usually round and deep; often has a handle and lid
As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity.
the lowermost portion of a structure partly or wholly below ground level; often used for storage
He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of
thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
one of several parts or pieces that fit with others to constitute a whole object
The largest section of
the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,
consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all
copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded
a
the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth,
wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper
during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into
the dim period of his early childhood.
denoting an action or event preceding or in preparation for something more important; designed to orient or acquaint with a situation before proceeding
He picked up his pen again and
wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up
her skirt.
There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
a sauce made by adding stock, flour, or other ingredients to the juice and fat that drips from cooking meats
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down.
a small explosive bomb thrown by hand or fired from a missile
At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had
been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst.
possession of the qualities (especially mental qualities) required to do something or get something done
It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in
a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in
the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with
nobody watching you, no voice pursuing
At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous demonst
so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable.
They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster
than sound.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in.
deviating from what is considered moral or right or proper or good
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that o
He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
applying to all or most members of a category or group
It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
a volcanic island in the North Atlantic near the Arctic Circle
Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
a person or thing that takes or can take the place of another
All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be
necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
commonly the lowest molding at the base of a column
His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died
loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and
because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a
conception of loyalty that was private and
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty
quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,
filled up the horizon of their minds.
The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them.
pour out in drops or small quantities or as if in drops or small quantities
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bo
They were down in some subterranean
place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it
was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for
a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the
swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant
facts were outside the r
established by authority; given authoritative approval
Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended.
Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.
To the right of the
speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a
larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of
Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.
the activity of exerting your muscles in various ways to keep fit
Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
someone who exhibits great independence in thought and action
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party.
a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
any of a variety of loose fitting cloaks extending to the hips or knees
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bought at
having a nose (either literal or metaphoric) especially of a specified kind
The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having
some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young
man with enormous forearms.
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold
cubicle
