| Summary: | Abstract
Three hundred years before George Orwell wrote his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty Four (edition 1984), 17th
century events referred to as the ‘Interregnum’, could have served as one source for his inspiration. Several
themes run through Orwell’s musings, and one pertains to the compilation of a dictionary scheduled for
publication by the year 2050. The purpose of Orwell’s lexicon is to document the finality of a process achieved
through ‘extirpation by redaction’. By intentionally reversing common definitions of specific words, and then
interjecting those alternative renditions into common usage, they eventually lose their original meanings, and
those words can then be removed from the dictionary. Orwell explained that it is part of a process to control
human memory: “You are unable to remember
real events and you persuade yourself that you remember
other events which never happened” (212). Today, each time the word ‘Interregnum’ is substituted for events
which took place between the years 1649 to 1660, the process of ‘extirpation by redaction’ is being employed.
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