Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1154]

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1154

Note

The famous ‘free’ example demonstrates how a word’s range of meaning is collapsed to kill a concept. The logic—concepts are nameless because they don’t exist, and unnameable because they don’t exist—shows the circular closure of the totalitarian vocabulary. This connects directly to the reader’s panopticon theme: internalized control depends on the absence of words to think with.