Comments by "marie parker" (@marieparker3822) on "BMJ gets fact checked" video.

  1. Orwell was right about political oppression and dictatorship, but wrong about language. He appeared to believe in the Museum Myth of language (current at the time) and that thought was totally dependent on language. Whorf ('thought is dependent on language') is now pretty discredited, but Orwell was not a psychologist or psycholinguist, and psycholinguistics has progressed a lot in 75 years. It is now known that there is a lot of thought without language as defined by humans in non-human primates (and other mammals, to a lesser extent) and in pre-linguistic human babies. Language can clarify thought, but simply scrubbing a word out of all dictionaries and all books will not get rid of a concept. A new word (or words) would be invented to describe the concept. The new words would not necessarily map on exactly to existing concepts - there might be more than one new word to describe different aspects or applications of an existing concept, as can happen when translating between languages.
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