It was 23 years ago today, according to George Orwell, that Winston Smith wrote in his diary "Down with Big Brother!" (来源：EnglishCN.com)

George Orwell was a pen name; Winston Smith was a fictional character, and Big Brother was Orwell's name for the personification of the power of the state—the power that broke the protagonist Winston—in his dystopian novel, 1984.

Although the lower-case big brother had been around since the previous century with the senses "older brother," or "a man who befriends a delinquent or friendless boy," the appearance of the capitalized Big Brother in 1949's 1984 quickly caught on with the public.

More than five decades later, Big Brother is understood as both "the leader of an authoritarian state or movement" and "an all-powerful government or organization monitoring and directing people's actions."

Two other terms from 1984 also were embraced by English speakers: newspeak, which Orwell described as "language designed to diminish the range of thought," and which is used for any "propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings;" and doublethink, naming "a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas."