Kreowanie znaczeń we współczesnej nowej nowomowie

Abstract

Modern Newspeak or democratic Newspeak undoubtedly have a modifying effect on the values and speech, becoming almost a form of linguistic censorship. The subject of these linguistic exploration is the mini-dictionary compiled by Michał Wojciechowski, which illustrates the basic techniques used by modern “public speakers” to manipulate the sense of words which have an established meaning in Polish in the name of “political correctness” (PC). Inpractice the rules of PC amount to irrational and unconditional acceptance of everything the government wants and enforces (ideologically) proper language, giving old terms not so much a new meaning as range. The aim of the article is to describe the basic semantic mechanisms of the transformation, in particular: marginalisation, often deprecating, of terms expressing traditional values; ways of attributing arbitrary meanings to positive terms; generating new terms, on one hand as carriers of new ideology, on the other to slander or neutralise an opponent.