Monday 5 April 2021

I wonder whether they've censored "Nineteen Eighty-Four" yet?

From Part One, Chapter 7, as printed in 1976:

Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston... He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy hair, his face pouched and seamed with thick negroid lips.

If anybody has a more recent print, I'd love to know what happened to that sentence.

UPDATE: Lucy (in the comments) confirms that the sentence in book she bought in Canada in 2012 is as follows: "Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston... He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips."
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A couple of other things struck me on re-reading it recently:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


There are endless articles like this trying to explain or justify why Orwell didn't make the second slogan "SLAVERY IS FREEDOM", which would fit in with the logic of the other two. I'm not convinced. I don't think it was a 'mistake' as it was clearly deliberate, but I still think it was a misjudgement on his part. Unless he wanted to troll his own readers.
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Part One, Chapter 1, on a visit to the cinema:

A woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didn't oughter of showed it not in from of kids...

I'm in two minds about this. Was Winston highlighting the proles' incapacity to distinguish between 'have' and 'of', or was Orwell highlighting that under IngSoc, not even Party workers like Winston have a basic grasp of grammar any more?

Either way, he called that one right. I have colleagues - whom you'd expect to be reasonably intelligent or well-educated - who think that 'of' is an acceptable alternative spelling of 'have'. I usually send the terse one-word reply "Have" (making sure to hit 'reply' and not 'reply all').

6 comments:

Frank said...

When replying to serial havefenders I replace all "haves" with "ofs" and all "ofs" with "haves". It doesn't make any difference but I of some fun with it.

Bayard said...

"shouting they didn't oughter of showed it not in from of kids..."

The grammatical error is missing out the inverted commas. If it's reported speech, the grammar can be as bad as you like.

Mark Wadsworth said...

F, nothing makes any difference any more. Or so I of found.

B, arguably so.

Lola said...

'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. As I can attest from direct experience - the quango state's workshop manual.

Lucy said...

Here's what happened to that sentence in Canada! My copy of 1984 is a Canadian e-book dated 2012. The sentence in that edition reads:

Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston... He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips.

Lucy

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, brilliant, thanks. I thought so.