Entertainment / Literature / Dystopia: (from Greek, dys topos, 'bad place') The opposite of a utopia, a dystopia is an imaginary society in fictional writing that represents, as M. H. Abrams puts it, 'a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination' (Glossary 218). For instance, while a utopia presents readers with a place where all the citizens are happy and ruled by a virtuous, efficient, rational government, a dystopia presents readers with a world where all citizens are universally unhappy, manipulated, and repressed by a sinister, sadistic totalitarian state. This government exists at best to further its own power and at worst seeks actively to destroy its own citizens' creativity, health, and happiness. Examples of fictional dystopias include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
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Entertainment / Literature / Utopia: An imaginary place or government in which political and social perfection has been reached in the material world as opposed to some spiritual afterlife as discussed in the Christian Bible or the Elysi MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Whorfs Hypothesis: A proposal that language affects how its speakers perceive and react to the world--and that the limitations of language thus become the limitations of human thought. Although first set forward by amat MORE