please return to your Primehouse, valued Primecitizen

September 30, 2018 5:30 PM

When did the word "citizen" as a term of address acquire Orwellian overtones? Was there a specific piece of media that did it?

It's not Orwell. I've had people suggest Halflife 2, but that seems far too recent.

posted by dmd to Society & Culture (12 answers total)

Surely it's been ominous since the Reign of Terror, as citoyen?
posted by Countess Elena at 5:47 PM on September 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

It's probably not the first instance, either in its own universe or in English-language media in general, but the final image on this page shows citizen being used as a term of address with clear dystopian significance multiple times by Judge Dredd no later than Dec. 29, 1979.
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:13 PM on September 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

Another English-language instance occurred to me, but it's pretty minor. In C.M. Kornbluth's 1955 Cold War paranoia novel, Not This August, there's this exchange:

He said: "Cultural greetings, comrade-citizeness-post-woman."

"Cultural greetings to you, comrade-citizen-milk-farmer. What the heck kept you?"

posted by Wobbuffet at 8:43 PM on September 30, 2018

I'm prepared to be quite wrong here, but I speculate that insofar as "citizen," as a term of address, has dark overtones in English, that has its roots in Soviet usage. In the Soviet Union, "citizen" was, as far as I understand, generally used as a term of address when the equality connoted by "comrade" was inappropriate, such as when a person was addressed by a representative of the legal system or security apparatus.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 8:51 PM on September 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

Starship Troopers is earlier than HL2, but HL2 is what put it on my contemporary radar. It's not used as a term of address in the ST movie, though.
posted by rhizome at 11:23 PM on September 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, back in 1859.
posted by Azara at 12:53 AM on October 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

The term would seem to have been coined no later than 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. While this did not, in and of itself, establish the Orwellian overtones the word has today, it can be seen as the precursor to subsequent events and the use of the term "citizen" as a partisan identifier.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:33 AM on October 1, 2018

If period pieces and translations count, Hendrik Conscience's 1855 novel Veva is an early negative portrayal of the First Republic that often makes use of citizen as a term of address. However, OP--to help with a linguistic term normally describing parts of words rather than whole words--I wonder if what you're looking for is at what point did the connotations of the term acquire a sort of semantic productivity such that people writing in English began using it themselves in new circumstances to suggest something Orwellian rather than to translate specific cultural/historical referents.
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:09 AM on October 1, 2018

It's Russia, not fiction.
posted by twoplussix at 8:08 AM on October 1, 2018

Starship Troopers is earlier than HL2, but HL2 is what put it on my contemporary radar. It's not used as a term of address in the ST movie, though.


"Service guarantees citizenship!"
posted by DrAstroZoom at 8:08 AM on October 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

"Citizen", with the dark foreboding described, hit my radar playing Paranoia in college. And, in that, it is definitely a reference to Communist-era addressing within the Soviet Union.
posted by hanov3r at 2:57 PM on October 2, 2018

Just a quick note on the use in Starship Troopers (the book) Citizen is an elevated social position akin to veteran. Though in some circles in that world it is looked down on a bit by the aristocratic business class as a bit to blue collar. At least within the context of the book folks wouldn't use it as a term of ominous social control. Heck one of the authors more well known quotes is "In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master.'"
posted by The Violet Cypher at 9:44 AM on October 5, 2018