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1984 By George Orwell

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emmie | 08:05 Tue 18th May 2021 | Arts & Literature
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has anyone read this book and can give me the gist of what's its about - i have a friends copy and been meaning to read it, but other stuff has come in the way. I know its quite a serious book but any feedback would be most welcome.
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Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" has similar visions of a dystopian future.
dunno, PP, Tett wrote

" Nearly 100 years ago, a US fire-safety inspector called Benjamin Lee Whorf noticed something odd about the way factory workers handled oil drums.
The workers had been trained never to smoke near the drums to prevent explosions, yet accidents kept on happening and the engineers couldn’t work out why. But Whorf, who was not just a trained engineer but also an amateur anthropologist, had observed, without preconceptions, how the workers behaved in their everyday habitat. Eventually, he realised that while they were very careful around oil drums marked “full”, they kept on smoking around those drums marked “empty”.


That was 2018 so she must know something. Trained anthropologist who got interested in why people took out financial instruments so complicated that even their bankers didn't understand them and ended up being one of about three people in the world who predicted the subprime crash.

Then again she fell down a lift shaft in Moscow, which is more dangerous than a subprime mortgage.
Put me off rats big time.
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not spoilers woof, just people's opinions which i now have. have already started it and im on page 45 will let you know how i get on.
I've seen the film but not read the book.

I read Animal Farm years ago and that was brilliant.
I first read this book as a secondary high school set work book. It wld have been approx 1993.

I’ve re-read is numerous times. Too many to count. It’s that good - tho a tad depressing

The most recent
Being last year midway thru covid.... something that cast the book in a more contemporary light.
jno I am very very impressed with the whole of your contribution. I am shocked and complimented that you read and understand - - the financial times

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is controversial on many levels, starting with its name. Linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir were close collaborators in the first decades of the 20th century, but they never actually published a hypothesis together about language and cognition.

The sixties thesis was that there are various things you can say in one language and and not in another. Sapin used Eskimo ( Inuktituk I suppose) and his analysis that the language defied grammar and they ( the eskimo ) seemed to speak in sentences

It was later claimed he used tightly filtered sentences to illustrate his points. I cannot find my email to her to which she didnt reply but it was on the practice of selective presentation of data.

this guy is for it
https://www.laserfiche.com/ecmblog/linguistic-theory-can-business-edge-really/

but even he whacks in: Regardless of the degree to which the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is actually legitimate,

thank you for your interest - I will have to go for a cup of tea

for intellects and egg heads - tetts article is here
https://www.ft.com/content/37cb5720-7413-11e8-aa31-31da4279a601

got behind a pay wall.

I think I reproved Tett for taking Sapir Whorf as obviously true when it is still argued about.

interesting read but doesnt mention NewSpeak or 1984
Interesting casting in the film.
Richard Burton
Trigger from OFAH as the waiter
Rab C Nesbitt
surely though the "can't say things in certain languages" idea has a basis in common sense? If you live somewhere where snow is non existent why would a word for it ever have been developed....or even the concept?
We have modern proof of concept preceding word ....we didn't need a word for analogue timepieces until there were digital ones. "cis" (Naomi's anathema) only came into being when "non cis" began to be discussed openly.

The oil drum thing is bad on the job training....one of the first things ANYBODY is taught in crude oil and product management is that its the mix of fumes and oxygen that make things go boom. Empty non inerted tanks are the dodgy ones. I am told, although I have never seen it done, that you can throw lighted matches down a tankful of crude oil.
yeah you cant make diesel burn unless you er warm it first ( wh isnt difficult DURING a fire)

Yeah Sapir Whorf takes in a hundred words in Eskimo for snow - and many words for camel for the bedu
and in passing takes in whether Henry VIII cd have designed a nuclear reactor.

Comes in two forms - strong and weak ( you know - like Tea)
Sapir used well chosen Eskimo sentences
and I thought - - - they had tried to re access Whorfs data on oil drums with limited success. These are the two main areas of attack

One of our French workers said there was no direct translation of "wrong kind of snow" - kind in French can never have wrong as a context. And the same of "whiter shade of pale" but I dont regard that as supporting the thesis

Do you recollect the child genius Ruth Lawrence? She now gives her advanced maths courses for undergrads in classical hebrew. No one turns up

so .. that is part of my Tet offensive -
hur hur - that will give the plebs something to foo about
// The oil drum thing is bad on the job training..//
this is 1924
men having lunch on a girder on the empire state bldg era
We read it at school and I've read it a few times since. Saw the film, in b&w I think. It's worth reading, some things seem fairly accurate, if very late, others are way off. It's a short book, worth a go.
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at 323 pages its not that short, will continue with it later on...
if you google Orwell Whorf
you get quite a lot on NewSpeak
actually not much different to here - but much much wordier, god dont the social scientists go on. - one idea per paper and papers commonly 50 pp. oh lardy dah !
All you need to know first Emmie is that Orwell(who worked for the Beep) meant it as a warning. The Lefties, marxists, woke, and luvvies use it as an operations manual.
Orwell was a leftist
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was he a leftist, this is not how it reads. I am finding it quite complex, not so much a difficult read, but im 100 pages shy of finishing it.
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For much of his adult life, Orwell was a card-carrying member of Britain’s Independent Labour Party, but like his views on religion, he didn’t accept it without major reservations and often disagreed with the party’s approach to the details of social governance.

Perhaps what would most sum up Orwell’s sociopolitical views is his commentary on his writing, of which he said:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism as I understand it.10
yep... he identified as a socialist, though he was never a communist. 1984 was at the time written about the soviet union but one of the reason it has endured is because it is about totalitarianism itself. Orwell was careful to separate that from any one "side" as both are capable...

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1984 By George Orwell

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