avoid doing this, but within
a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have
vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no
more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ?politically
equal?, or that free had once meant ?intellectually free?, than for
instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the
secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many
crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing
characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its
words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and
the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with
the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten,
but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there,
imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one?s knowledge of
Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments,
even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and
untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak
into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or
some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (goodthinkful
would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant
that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a
whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to
ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as
language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration
of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,
that among these are