When the outline of feeling begins to blur
Living between languages teaches you something difficult to forget: some feelings can only be fully touched in one language.
Take the Japanese phrase mono no aware もののあはれ. Try translating it into English and something always slips away. The pathos of things is not wrong, exactly, but it is not quite it either.
The Portuguese word saudade is not quite nostalgia, not quite loneliness, not quite longing.
And there is no single English or French word that neatly matches komorebi—sunlight filtering through leaves. Dappled sunlight comes closer, but still misses something.
This is not just a matter of vocabulary.
Without the right word, it becomes harder to identify a feeling clearly, to hold it, to carry it, to share it with someone else. Language does not simply describe the world. At the risk of sounding grand, it also helps determine the outline of how the world feels.
I found myself thinking about this while listening to an episode of The Book Club, in which the historian Dominic Sandbrook and the writer Tabitha Syrett discussed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
At the center of their conversation was a deeply Orwellian fear: if language narrows, thought narrows with it. If the words for dissent disappear, dissent itself becomes harder to form.
I think that is true. But moving between languages has made me suspect that the loss does not stop at thought. It reaches feeling too. The finer distinctions within feeling also begin to blur when they lose their names.
Newspeak does not just reduce vocabulary. It reduces the mind’s range.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell imagines a language called Newspeak.
Its purpose is explicit: to narrow the range of thought. Winston’s colleague Syme explains it with pride. We are destroying words, he says. Scores of them. Hundreds of them every day.
“Bad” becomes unnecessary because “ungood” will do. “Excellent” can be replaced by “plusgood” or “doubleplusgood.”
At first glance, this seems like little more than a clumsy simplification.
But that is not what makes Newspeak frightening.
Its real danger lies in the way it reduces not just words, but the available forms of thought. In a language with a rich vocabulary, we can separate fine distinctions: dislike, contempt, disgust, injustice, hypocrisy, danger. These words are related, but they are not interchangeable. They allow us to sort our anger, sharpen our judgment, and explain why something feels wrong.
Newspeak flattens those distinctions.
And when distinctions disappear, criticism loses resolution. Resistance becomes crude and inarticulate. A person may still feel that something is wrong, but without the language to define that wrongness, the feeling remains private. It does not become thought in a fuller sense. And what never becomes thought cannot easily become shared opposition.
This is what Orwell feared.
Not people with small vocabularies, but people who can no longer explain what is wrong, where it is wrong, or why it matters. The feeling of unease may remain. But if there are no words to turn that unease into an idea, it cannot be shared, organized, or turned into resistance.
And Newspeak is not frightening only because it forbids. It is more dangerous than that.
It is convenient. Fast. Efficient. Easy to understand. It relieves us of the burden of complexity. It lets us avoid ambiguity. It reduces the effort of thought. Which is precisely why people can grow accustomed to it willingly.
Newspeak is not just linguistic poverty.
It is a system for making thought more energy-efficient.
And energy-efficient thought is often very convenient for power.
A writer who had stood on the side of control
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903, when India was still under British rule. After Eton, he did not go to university. Instead, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma.
In other words, before he became one of the twentieth century’s great critics of authority, he had stood on the side of surveillance, confinement, and empire.
That fact stayed with him.
He later fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, witnessed the deceptions of Stalinism, and then worked for the BBC, producing propaganda for overseas broadcasts during the war. One detail from that period has become almost too neat to be true: the room where BBC editorial meetings were held later gave its name to the most terrifying room in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Room 101.
Imagined horror, it turns out, often begins at an ordinary desk.
Perhaps that is why Orwell could write so well about the machinery of power. He was not observing it from a safe distance. He had stood too close to it.
Not prophecy so much as an extension of reality
Nineteen Eighty-Four is often read as a prophecy. That is not wrong. But it is only half right.
Much of the novel’s atmosphere came not from some distant fantasy of the future, but from Orwell’s own England. The broken lift. The smell of boiled cabbage. The shabby buildings. The bad alcohol. The poverty that feels like rationing stretched into permanence. This was less an alien dystopia than postwar London pushed a little further.
That matters.
Because it means the novel is not really about a nightmare descending from nowhere. It is about the world in front of us moving, step by step, in a particular direction. Not a sudden collapse into totalitarianism, but the slow normalization of deprivation, falsification, and fear.
Even the novel’s original working title points in that direction. Orwell first considered calling it The Last Man in Europe.
That title may be colder, and in some ways more exact.
Winston Smith is not a hero. He is not a revolutionary who changes the future. He is simply one man placed before a vast system and tested to the point of breaking.
Orwell finished the book in November 1948 on the remote Scottish island of Jura, his body weakened by tuberculosis. He is said to have typed as many as 4,000 words a day, even though doctors had ordered complete rest.
And what he produced is a story with almost no mercy in it.
Winston tries to resist. He keeps a diary. He enters a forbidden love affair. He reaches toward what he believes is a resistance movement. But everything is a trap.
In the end, he is tortured into betrayal. He betrays the woman he loves. He comes to love the dictator.
No hope survives.
The system wins absolutely.
A total political system defeats a human being from the inside
Why did Orwell choose to write something so relentlessly dark?
Because I think what he feared was not merely that human beings could be killed. It was that they could be rewritten inwardly. Not only silenced, but remade. Not only punished, but trained to feel, speak, and eventually even love according to the demands of power.
There is a further irony here. Nineteen Eighty-Four itself was quickly turned into a political weapon.
An editor at Orwell’s publisher reportedly described it as a book worth a million votes to the Conservative Party. Orwell was furious. He insisted that he had not written an anti-socialist tract, but a warning against totalitarianism in general.
And still, readers read books through their own political needs.
Even a book about distortion can itself be distorted. Even the author’s own words can be repurposed by others into something else. For Orwell, I suspect, that too would have felt like a kind of nightmare.
What about our world?
In 2026, it is hard to laugh at Newspeak as if it belonged safely to the past.
Language today does not always become thinner because a state commands it to. Sometimes it thins more quietly, more voluntarily, more diffusely.
On social media, complex feeling is at a disadvantage. Sentences that contain hesitation, reserve, or unresolved tension do not travel well. A position that says, “I am not fully convinced, but neither can I dismiss this,” is weak in the attention economy. Shorter, sharper, more immediately legible statements perform better.
In a recent essay in Bungeishunju (May 2026), the mathematician and writer Fujiwara Masahiko observes that someone once counted the syllables in Trump’s speeches and found that only 7 percent of his words contained four or more syllables—roughly the vocabulary level of a fourth-grade student. Orwell would have recognized the method immediately.
What follows is not merely brevity.
Truth itself begins to shift into something selected according to position. Once, at least in principle, truth was truth and falsehood was falsehood. Now phrases such as “my truth” and “your truth” circulate with a familiarity that would once have seemed strange.
That, I think, is where Orwell remains disturbingly current.
The danger is not simply that someone declares that two plus two equals five. The real danger is that people can be brought to believe it. That reality itself becomes something pliable—rewritten, reduced, adjusted to fit the needs of power.
Moving between languages, I feel this thinning very clearly.
What disappears is not just vocabulary.
It is shading. Reserve. Hesitation. Nuance. The range of feeling that ought not to be flattened into a single blunt word.
No one needs to smash language with a hammer.
It is enough for the quick, the forceful, and the simplified to crowd everything else out.
The world Orwell feared may not arrive exactly as he imagined it. But I think he was right about its method. Language can be thinned until reality itself becomes easier to manage.
Why we still have to write
When language thins, feeling thins with it.
At the very least, our ability to identify, hold, communicate, and defend feeling grows weaker.
That is why we still have to write.
Not only to make arguments.
Not only to react.
But to preserve feelings that have not yet lost their names, and realities that have not yet been rewritten. ■
First published on Substack on May 6, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/when-language-thins-feeling-thins
Cover image: Senate House, University of London (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
