Dave and Nick's coalitionspeak

Newspeak is the language people use in George Orwell's great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak has just a basic vocabulary and grammar because the totalitarian ruling Party plans to make any kind of alternative thinking — "thoughtcrime" —   impossible by removing words that describe the idea of freedom.

In Newspeak, words are simplified, so "better" becomes "gooder", and "best" is "goodest". In the same way, "great" becomes "plusgood" and "excellent" is "doubleplusgood". Words with opposite meanings are removed, so "bad" becomes "ungood". The Newspeak word for the English language, by the way, is "Oldspeak" and the Party aims to replace Oldspeak completely with Newspeak before 2050.

I was thinking about all this when I heard that the new British coalition government of David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats is eliminating much of the jargon that was everyday English during Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's 13 years of Labour Party rule. So, the first word to go is "State". It is being replaced by David Cameron's "Big Society" — his idea that power should be taken away from government and given back to communities.

The word "stakeholder," meaning someone with an interest in a policy, is gone and in its place we have "people". The horrible "delivery model" is now the much better "getting things done", while the awful "integrated working" has become the longer, but more understandable "people working together to provide better services".

Generally, it's never good news when politicians interfere with language, but I have to say that I like Dave and Nick's "coalitionspeak". Not everyone agrees, though, as you'll hear on this BBC radio show, where the linguist Dr Nicholas Ostler and the satirist Alistair Beaton discuss the language of the new government.