The Devil and the Duckspeakers, by Francis X. Maier

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing, October 8, 2025

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.

Every few years, I reread a couple of my favorite authors.  George Orwell, despite his disdain for things Catholic, has always been on my list.  This time I paid special attention to his essay, “The Principles of Newspeak.” He appended it to his dystopian novel 1984.  As Orwell noted in his text, Newspeak – the language of Oceania’s Airstrip One (formerly the UK) – had three distinct vocabularies; A, B, and C.  The B vocabulary “had been deliberately constructed for political purposes.”  Its words “had, in every sense, a political implication.”  They were designed to impose a desired mental attitude upon the user.

A perfect such B-word was duckspeak.  It meant “to quack like a duck.”  Ultimately, for Newspeak’s linguists:

it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. . . .[Thus, like] various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning.  Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, it was paying a warm and valued compliment. …