Remember when "1984" was fiction?

In the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell imagined a future society in which everyone accepted the official ideology, and in which punishment and terror were unnecessary. Instead, people were kept under control because they spoke, heard, read and wrote only a single, specially contrived language - the language of Newspeak.

...Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. It was expected that Newspeak would finally have superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050...

The purpose of Newspeak 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. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of
Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to
give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding
all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free", since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

... A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.

Everyday I see our language and its meaning being deconstructed, our voices silenced and our culture being dissected by ideologically driven political correctness.

"...we ain't in Kansas anymore, Toto!"