Editing Nadsat (section)

== Function ==
Burgess was a [[polyglotism|polyglot]] who loved language in all its forms.<ref>"[He] loved to scatter polyglot obscurities like potholes throughout his more than 50 novels and dozens of nonfiction works. He could leap gaily from Welsh to French to Malay to Yiddish in one breath." Henry Kisor, ''[[Chicago Sun-Times]]'' 24 August 1997.</ref> However, he realized that if he used contemporary slang, the novel would very quickly become dated, owing to the way in which teenage language is constantly changing. He was therefore forced to invent his own vocabulary, and to set the book in an imaginary future. Burgess was later to point out that, ironically, some of the Nadsat words in the book had been appropriated by American teenagers, "and thus shoved [his] future into the discardable past."<ref>Anthony Burgess, 'Teenspeech', in Anthony Burgess, ''[[Homage to Qwert Yuiop]]'' London (Century Hutchinson) 1986, page 180.</ref> His use of Nadsat was pragmatic; he needed his narrator to have a unique voice that would remain ageless, while reinforcing Alex's indifference to his society's norms, and to suggest that youth subculture was independent from the rest of society. In ''[[A Clockwork Orange (novel)|A Clockwork Orange]]'', Alex's interrogators describe the source of his [[argot]] as "[[Subliminal stimuli|subliminal]] penetration".