Building sinew into language

> There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless…

> But a science fiction writer, Orwell, has given us a marvelous and versatile vocabulary word for discussing this: now we can say, ‘‘Your surveillance idea is a bad one because it is Orwellian’’ – we can import all of that novel and its horrors with one compact word…

> It’s this trick of putting blood and sinew into the argument that is the best that science fiction has to offer. It’s this that makes science fiction more relevant in an era of technological upheaval and social chaos. – [Cory Doctorow](http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/01/cory-doctorow-a-vocabulary-for-speaking-about-the-future/)