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