Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [258]

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. 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. 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. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 258

Note

The extension of panoptic surveillance inward to one’s own face — ‘a nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety’ — shows how the apparatus polices involuntary muscle movements. The coining of ‘facecrime’ at the end converts a fact into a named category, demonstrating Newspeak’s capacity to criminalize the body itself.