Newspeak is just a way of harnessing groupthink. Come to think of it, groupthink sounds vaguely Orwellian...
That's because the word was a deliberate invention, purposely designed to remind you of Newspeak. The book by Irving Janis pioneered it and an examination of its role in the failed Bay of Pig's invasion and American failure to prepare for Pearl Harbor, and examining how the response to the Cuban Missile Crisis avoided it.
That language follows thought is an obvious point to anyone whose argued a pendantic point on the internet. Often two sides agree on the substance of a point but cannot agree on terminology. This is often because one or both sides wishes to claim or avoid a certain word which is variably suited to the point at hand, often because of the words political or social connotations. An example: Two sides basically agree on the definition of degrees of racism in some circumstance, but one side wishes to use "discriminatory" or "biased", while the other insists that those words are synonymous with the more charged word "racism". Even if both sides agree on what is what, they cannot necessarily agree on what to call it. Does this matter? Absolutely. Because then when people go around with their own definitions of racism, it matters hugely when they get into arguments. Suddenly one side is saying racism is not a problem, another is saying it's always existed and impossible to get rid of, a third is saying it's a real problem with specific solutions, and all these people are essentially discussing different things entirely.
This isn't a trivial issue either! One of the reason lawmaking is a profession and not something you or I do with our spare time is that the law needs to be complex in order to avoid letting people interpret as they would like, not as how the lawmakers intended it.
I heard somewhere the theory that one partial reason east-Asians do better at math is because their number language is well suited to calculating. As opposed to this was the Danish language (with it's infamously convoluted numbering system) making it harder to do math. Since I don't speak any east-Asian languages I can't really say if even the underlying idea is correct, but it sure seems like it when you look at Danish 
Simple way to test that; look at scores for people who are East Asian by heritage but don't speak the language.
Having gone to a form of highschool for gifted kids, that happened to have a staggeringly high proportion of Asians (primarily east-asian, although a hefty proportion were Indian, and a non-trivial proportion were what I guess you could call west-asian), I can say that there is definitely more than language involved. Some, I might say most, of them were so thoroughly Americanized they were generally indistinguishable from the average American teen, albeit far nerdier (it was a nerd's school).
I might suggest that such a thing is intrinsic to immigration and parenting instead, as the ethnic make-up was interesting in general: the white population in my school was largely eastern-european in origin, with most being children of immigrants (as were most east-asians and west-asians in my school), and very few, say, Irish (who have all already been here in New York for many decades.) for example. Technically I fall into that category as well. It's hard to explain such a thing without considering the difference between people whose parents were raised here and not.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14964939 times)