Nineteen Eighty-Four and opera. The effect of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs) and Newspeak (ideological language) have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority. Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of "doublethink", and the adjective "Orwellian" means similar to Orwell's writings, especially "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The practice of ending words with (such as "mediaspeak") is drawn from the novel. Orwell is perpetually associated with 1984; in July 1984, an asteroid was discovered by Antonín Mrkos and named
O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four) however is more sadistic than the cold, detached Gletkin, and prefers to use torture himself, whereas Gletkin prefers to torment his prisoners psychologically. The torture scenes (undertaken by O'Brien) were influenced in part by the stories leaked out of the USSR of the punishments inflicted on political prisoners in mental hospitals and the Gulag. The choice of the clearly Irish surname is regarded as a reference to Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken, under whom Orwell worked during the war creating propaganda, and whom Orwell detested. In what has been described as "one of the strangest coincidences in literature", it was