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telescreen
[ tel-uh-skreen ]
Word History and Origins
Origin of telescreen1
Example Sentences
Orwell described her as “a rebel from the waist down,” and Newman gives her a slightly smutty history in the Ministry’s pornographic section, where she appeased the lower ranks with titles including “Inner Party Sinners: ‘My Telescreen Is Broken, Comrade!’”
Thomas Boswell was the only sportswriter to bring me to tears — on Carl Yastrzemski’s last season, watching his younger self on the Fenway telescreen, alone in the dugout at Fenway during a rain delay; or sharing a “eureka” moment from County Stadium watching the O’s finesse pitcher change speeds; or assessing our mortality: “In the game of life we all lose, eventually.”
Everyone who is anyone must have a "telescreen", through which Big Brother can watch them.
But there is a hint in the story that these devices were originally something people chose to buy: when the duplicitous Mr Charrington needs to give Winston a believable reason for the apparent lack of a telescreen in his spare room, he says they were "too expensive", and "I never seemed to feel the need of it".
Behind them all looms the “never-sleeping ear” of George Orwell’s telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.”
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