From Orwell's "1984" which was published in 1949, the same year the Department of Defense was established out of what used to be the Department of War or "War Office". In 1947 The Department of War was split into three separate departments - Army, Navy and Air Force - which were gathered into the National Military Establishment which in turn was renamed to Department of Defense in 1949.
Neither of these are applicable to the return of the War Department. This on-the-nose name for the department leaves nothing to guess about its purpose - war clearly is not peace and ignorance of that fact is not strength hence the name War Department instead of Ministry of Peace.
On the other hand, I think anyone who knows when Orwell died should know Noneteen-Eighty-Four, so the comment should be seen as a joke, though it helps to give a textual signal like /jk
Combining a thing with its opposite is a generic algorithm for generating short, profound-sounding sentences in the language game. You can try it with anything
- Ugliness is beautiful.
- Happiest people are the saddest.
- The darkest light is bright.
- Comfort is uncomfortable.
- Impossible is easy.
- The biggest people are the smallest.
- The bravest are the most afraid.
- Obvious things are the most uncertain.
- Peace is war.
You can keep going for all words with an antonym. Any insight or truth in these statements comes from your brain trying to give them meaning because they're grammatically correct and so short they can't be immediately discarded as obviously false.
One of the Teletypes I used to work on had an eccentric-driven Wiffletree to position the typebox. This was necessary because of it's high speed[0] to decode the ASCII character set (it wasn't a Baudot machine). The selector cam at the end of the machine would do the serial-to-parallel conversion, then clutches would rotate the eccentrics powering the wiffletree to select the character.
If you look at the ASCII chart [1] you can select a character via binary tree - the Wiffletree being a mechanical equivalent.
