Synonyms and the General Over-Construction of the English Language

There are so many words in the English language, and sometimes you just don't know the right words to choose. When many people want to learn about words they've never used before, or if they just want to spice up their normal conversations (probably just to appear more intelligent), they buy a thesaurus. While I am rather linguistic myself, I often ask myself, "Why, oh why do we need so many damn words?"

Now unfortunately, I know there will never be an attempt to rid the world of all its useless words, and even if there was this has proven to not work well in George Orwell's classic novel 1984. The language in the book, known as Newspeak, sought to remove all synonyms and antonyms as well as of course, to control the minds of the people. They took all the synonyms for good, and simply just got rid of them. This means all of your fancy-schmancy words like fantastic, great, wonderful, and yes even orgasmic were replaced with good, plusgood, and doubleplusgood.

And of course while they were in the process of getting rid of all of the synonyms, they said " Hell, why don't we just get rid of all of the incidents as well?" And that's just what they did. Bad, and all of its synonyms became ungood, plusungood, and so on and so forth.

And of course in the context of the story, this was merely done to control the thoughts and minds of people. Let's go through a quick exercise and we can really see what life would be like if we got rid of all of the synonyms for our various words.

We are going to choose a sentence that is absolutely filled to the brim with fancy words that most people don't know without the use of a thesaurus. That sentence is:

"I was flabbergasted and amazed at the audacity of the husband's decision to incapacitate his wife for her miserably feeble interpretation of the manuscript."

Now let us go to our trusty thesaurus and cut out all of those fancy interesting words with the shortest, most efficient, and simplest words we can. After we do this, the sentence winds up looking something like this:

"I was alarmed at nerve of the man's choice to hurt his spouse for her bad reading of the book."

Not only is it boringly simple, but it doesn't give us a proper feel for the situation. The so-called "fixed" sentence gives us just the facts, without any embroidering world operating in any way. The original sentence takes us down an entrancing journey of mimsy and wonder, and of course, spousal abuse based on a wife's inability to read well. And if I know one thing, it's that everybody loves a good spousal abuse story. And we certainly wouldn't want to ruin that.