Nadsat and Clockwork Oranges

Not previously published. Originally written in May of 2025, posted to Facebook on 2 May 2025. The book images show the edition I first read in 1986 and the first American publication to include the book’s “missing” 21st chapter in 1988, followed by images from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie. At the end I include images of a dozen selected pages from my thesis.

The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, Chapter 2

For my Master’s degree in English, I had the choice to pass a comprehensive exam or to write a thesis. I eagerly chose the thesis, not just because the day-long exam was intimidating, but because I far preferred to write. I originally proposed an exploration of themes of sexuality and language in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I also considered Eugene Zamiatin’s We and books by Ayn Rand. My three wise thesis advisors suggested that I narrow my focus to just one dystopian novel, and perhaps just one theme. I chose A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962, and assembled an exhaustive linguistic study and annotation of the entirety of Anthony Burgess’s invented terms that made up the book’s Nadsat argot, with page references, frequency of usage, occasional contexts, and categories for each word or phrase. But more than that, I also provided meanings for each term and researched and speculated on their derivations, mostly from Russian but also other languages, such as Malay (the author wrote the book, purportedly in just three weeks, after returning to England from a years-long teaching job in Malaya). I lived with a Russian dictionary, and other dictionaries and reference books, while slowly reviewing each page of the novel to identify and explore sources for each invented word and phrase.

I was partly inspired to pursue this project by a seven-page glossary of Nadsat terms compiled by Stanley Edgar Hyman for a 1965 Ballantine reprinting of the novel, which I had first read in 1986. His simple list provided a fascinating key that unlocked many Nadsat terms, even though one could gain the gist of many terms from context. But his glossary was short, highly selective, and limited chiefly to Russian-derived terms. I felt I could be far more comprehensive, so I had a go. These days a digital scan of the manuscript, which was not an option for me when I prepared my thesis, would make it far easier to create the underlying lists of terms and phrases, and might also be more reliable and thorough.

Although I couldn’t begin with a scan of the text, I was fortunate to be able to assemble my research and write my text on a computer, in the summer and fall of 1988. I used a Mac at the university library, as I did not yet have my own computer, saving files to 3.5-inch floppy discs that are now unreadable (I also still typed two spaces after each period, as in my typewriter days). I was required to produce at least 60 pages, double-spaced, but I ended up writing 254 pages of mostly single-spaced text. I loved every minute of my research and writing, which was why I wrote far more than the minimum, although my purpose and the scope of my subject also called for the level of detail I produced. This enjoyable work ended up bumping my graduation from 1988 to June of 1989, even though I finished my manuscript in November of 1988. I first painstakingly typed in all the terms, maybe a thousand of them, alphabetized them (I presume I used the computer to do that, although I don’t remember for certain), then added definitions and derivations and categorizations for each term. I also wrote a two-page preface and 54 pages of introduction (these parts were double-spaced), and other prose material, such as an overview of the categories to which I assigned terms, an analysis of the frequency of word occurrences, and a short chapter discussing my use of Hyman’s glossary. But the bulk of my thesis was a complete index of all Nadsat words from A Clockwork Orange, and extensively annotated glossaries of all individual terms and all longer phrases. It would not surprise me if my thesis is still the longest in the university’s history.

It was immensely satisfying to print out the finished product, after committee approval, although I received almost no feedback on the writing itself, or even most of the research. I titled my thesis A Sense of Play: An Annotated Linguistic Study of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I know that it cost $94.68 to get four copies of my thesis photocopied (I still have the receipt), and $15 to hard-bind each copy, with the title and my name embossed in silver on the front and spine (I’m surprised that this wasn’t more expensive). I think two copies went to the university library, one to the English department, and one was for me. This would probably cost more than $400 today.

I was looking forward to my thesis defense, anticipating engaged questions from fellow graduate students and department professors, but I recall that I was given a thank you and perfunctory congratulations and that was about it. It was as if I had just dropped a rose petal into the Grand Canyon, hoping for an echo. But still I enjoyed the writing, and all the research. Although Burgess scholarship has progressed in the decades since I completed my work, I feel that what I produced still has unique linguistic value and could well be published, even if I were to self-publish. It is certainly more comprehensive than any other study I’ve seen from the last 60 years, including online, of the invented Nadsat language (really an anti-language, or more accurately an argot). For this reason, I suspect that my research would be of at least some interest to members of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and perhaps also to the Burgess Archive. Or maybe just some dark and dusty corner of the Internet.

One factor that added to my excitement about this project was that the novel had two versions. In the United States, the book was published with just 20 chapters, ending on a negative note. This was the version that Stanley Kubrick followed in making his 1971 movie adaptation, which I first watched when I was writing the thesis. However, in the rest of the world, the book appeared with 21 chapters, in three sections of seven chapters each. All three sections began with the same sentence: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” This choice emphasized parallelism and intentionality in the book’s structure, and the question is answered in the final chapter. That 21st chapter was intended to represent maturity. In the book, the 20th chapter ends with Alex, the main character, undergoing forced institutional “reprogramming” to cure his ultraviolence. He’s cured, and that’s it, with the outcome of being like a machine (clockwork) rather than being organic (like an orange). But in the 21st chapter (spoiler alert), the reprogramming wears off and he chooses to reject ultraviolence of his own free will. Alex grows up. Or, as Alex himself puts it in Chapter 21’s second-last paragraph:

That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

Burgess’s point is that free will should triumph over State control and any mandated conformity, and that even Alex’s earlier choice to pursue ultraviolence was fundamentally at least still an expression of his free will. His savagery was perversely noble. The 21st chapter offers a more positive ending, which the American publisher thought Americans of the early 1960s would not care for, with the darker ending resonating with an omnipresent American fear of Soviet communism. But the original book had a thoughtful and elaborate structure and a message that Anthony Burgess preferred, even while he later decried the book as preachy and heavy-handed, whether it had 20 or 21 chapters. Right during the time of my exploration of the book, though, that missing 21st chapter was published in the United States for the first time, in Rolling Stone (how often can an academic manuscript cite such a publication?). My research included all the invented terms that appeared in that final chapter. The timing of this first publication in America of the “missing” chapter helped to give my thesis a timely relevance and some topical energy. And its point was to emphasize free will. As Burgess put it in his introduction to the novel when published in 1988 with the 21st chapter for the first time in the United States, “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice.”

The preceding details got me going as a happy researcher, but the most appealing aspect of Burgess’s book and my research on it was the terms themselves. For example, “droog” is derived from the Russian word for “friend” (also related to the Welsh word, “drwg,” meaning “evil,” although Burgess may not have been aware of this—or, knowing his polyglot proclivities, probably he was). Other terms were more obscure, such as “rassoodocks,” “vellocet,” and “drencrom.” Hundreds of these! They were key to giving the book a futuristic tone. But they served a deeper purpose, too, which was to make the world of Alex and his droogs feel alien, while also avoiding the datedness that would have plagued any use of existing British teen slang from the early 60s. And with the heavy influence of Russian, the Nadsat argot also suggested that the Soviet Union had taken over or dominated England and other parts of Europe (the book was written in the early years of the Cold War). The book was a warning, a prophetic dark comedy about the dangers of communist influence (and of course the niggling matter of free will). Just as in 1984, where language is controlled by the Thought Police, language is also central to the world of A Clockwork Orange, or at least its teenage gangs, who used their own argot as a reactionary form of self-expression in contrast to the government and “adult” society. But where the State is insidious in Orwell’s fiction, in Alex’s life, the seemingly more relaxed or accepted approach to language control reveals a deeper insidiousness—that Russian ideology and culture had become so deeply entrenched in England, where the novel is set, that hardly anyone resisted it. In fact, Nadsat embraces Russian. While Nadsat is a teen dialect, it symbolizes the pervasive force of an invasive language and culture on the full spectrum of society. In addition to serving as a critique of violence, the novel’s warning, as with other dystopian fiction, was that its depiction of societal norms and underbellies could well be the future of England. Would the English soon all be speaking Russian? Was free will itself under attack? My thesis unpacked the sense of play that drove Anthony Burgess to each of his dark linguistic inventions, exploring their role in furthering his dystopian warning.

Postscript

The Internet offers no end of discussion on A Clockwork Orange, the Nadsat teen language (more accurately an argot of teen slang), and of English author Anthony Burgess. Here are some selected links. Viddy your glazzies on these, my droogs.

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