its meaning, by cutting out most of the
associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist
International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal
human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris
Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a
tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers
to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as
a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost
without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over
which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way,
the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more
controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted
not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for
the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily
pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than
exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it
when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above
all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable
meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of
echoes in the speaker?s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained
in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike.
Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime,
joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others -- were words
of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between
the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling
style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly
what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially
speech on any subject not ideologically neutral,