Foster on Newspeak

Re: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050, Peter Foster, Jan. 5

Thank you for Peter Foster's mordantly funny explication of how Orwell's 1984 perfectly satirizes the current linguistic excesses of the totalitarian left. Yet the novel became a bestseller throughout the Trump era as an assumed satire of the totalitarian right. Given Orwell's contempt for Soviet-style socialism, Foster's reading is surely more correct. The great 18th-century Tory satirist Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) cautions elsewhere that “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.” Satire designs to provide a blistering, corrosively medicinal cure for what ails us. Let's hope that in good time it succeeds.

Lorrie Clark, Keene, Ont.