Redefinition
Changing what a word means, or attaching a familiar word to a new thing, so that an argument is won by the definition before it is made.
Whoever defines the terms wins the argument. If "light" cigarettes are defined by a machine test rather than by what smokers inhale, then light cigarettes are lighter and the argument is over. If "full employment" is redefined at a higher rate of unemployment, then full employment has been achieved. The device changes the meaning quietly and then uses the word in its old, trusted sense, so that the audience's familiarity with the word is borrowed for a new claim.
Orwell's Newspeak is the fiction; the practice is older and more mundane. It appears in regulation, where a category's definition decides who is counted; in marketing, where a claim is true under a definition the buyer doesn't know; and in politics, where a word's value is kept and its content replaced. Exploits Anchoring and Mere Exposure Effect.
Historical examples
Newspeak's purpose, in the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, was "not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible," chiefly by redefining words. "Free" survived only in the sense of "free from lice." Orwell drew the method from the political vocabularies of the 1930s and 1940s.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949, Appendix, "The Principles of Newspeak."
Klemperer recorded how the Nazi regime emptied and refilled ordinary words: "fanatical" became praise, "heroic" was applied to routine, "the people" excluded most of the people. The redefinitions were enforced by repetition until, he noted, even opponents used the words in their new senses.
Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Athlone, 2000.
In advertising and commerce
"Light" and "low tar" cigarettes were defined by a machine-smoking test that the industry knew smokers did not replicate, since they covered the filter's ventilation holes and drew harder. The words kept their ordinary meaning in advertising and their technical meaning in the lab. In 2009 the U.S. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act banned the descriptors, and the industry renamed the packs by color.
National Cancer Institute. Risks Associated with Smoking Cigarettes with Low Machine-Measured Yields of Tar and Nicotine. Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph 13. Bethesda, 2001; Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, Pub. L. 111-31 (2009), sec. 911.
Pick a word on a product label: natural, light, free, premium. Find out what it legally means. Is that what you thought it meant?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"Our chicken is 100% natural." The company's definition of natural permits antibiotics, feed additives, and injected brine.
What to notice. The ordinary sense of "natural" is borrowed for a product that meets only the speaker's definition.
"We have reached full employment." The government changed the threshold last year.
What to notice. The word kept its old value and lost its old content; the claim is true only under the new definition.
"This is a recyclable package." No facility in the country accepts the material.
What to notice. "Recyclable" defined as technically possible rather than actually done. Greenwashing is the setting; redefinition is the move.
Sources
- Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.
- Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Athlone, 2000. ISBN 978-0826491305
- National Cancer Institute. Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph 13. Bethesda, 2001.
- Lutz, William. Doublespeak. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ISBN 978-0060161347