From: joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   jm_1951@yahoo.com writes:   
      
   > In fact the appendix notably often does not comment on aspects of   
   > the text that you might expect. For example (it is 30 years since I   
   > read the book) as I recollect it starts something like "the clocks   
   > were striking thirteen", but I don't think the appendix comments on   
   > the adoption of the 24 hour clock and the abolition of a.m. and   
   > p.m. which it might have done.   
      
   I think that was meant to remind readers of military and (especially)   
   continental style rather than to be part of Newspeak as such.   
   Likewise the conversion to the metric system (half liters in the pub,   
   and kilometers on the railway), and the decimal currency.   
      
     But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed   
     To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made.   
                                                      -- G. K. Chesterton   
      
   (I read somewhere that when the book was published in the US, an   
   ignorant copyeditor thought that Britain was already using the metric   
   system and wished to change the metric units to English ones for the   
   benefit of American readers.)   
      
   One thing I have wondered about for a long time is why the Party   
   didn't change the calendar epoch to the year of the Revolution (as I   
   believe the French did for a while).  Of course, that would have   
   required renaming the book "The Year Twenty-Nine" or whatever.   
   --   
   ---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   ||:  Everything you do costs money, dissipates heat, and makes  :||   
   ||:  crumbs.                                                    :||   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)