1984 is slowly becoming a reality. Great work comrades!
This pull request does concern language, yes. But it retains the use of the term "slave" in existing APIs, while updating a script that is named "slaves" to use the term "deps," a term that is already used elsewhere in the API. At the end of the pull request, both terms remain meaningful. Furthermore, no attempt is made to hide previous use of the term - or to prevent using the term "slave" to refer to human slavery.
So I'm not sure I see the comparison.
"To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak,[1] a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalised such concepts into thoughtcrime as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy."
That might be the first Orwellian thing in this thread - people see a thing they've been told is bad and done by bad people and they need to get their Two Minutes Hate out, and they don't have the intellectual curiosity to spend those two minutes figuring out what's actually happening. (Actually, maybe there's a bit of Brave New World in there too.)
> there is plenty of language redefinition, history rewriting and statues toppling as we speak.
Give me specific examples, and we can talk about whether this is 1984 or not.
(I'm aware of some statues being toppled over the last couple of weeks that were originally put in place by people who wanted to rewrite history - and the act of toppling those statues has caused much more public discussion about the subjects of their statues and their true history than the statues themselves ever did. That hardly seems like 1984 to me. I'm not sure what you mean by language redefinition and history rewriting, otherwise.)