Pony Nadsat - A Clockwork Orange

You might be wondering what in the world "Pony Nadsat" means.
In this context, "pony" means "to understand" in the Nadsat language, a dialect from the imagination of Anthony Burgess - the author of A Clockwork Orange.  The vast majority of Nadsat is actually influenced by the Russian language.  "Pony" is based off of the Russian word "ponimat," which also means "to understand."  Thus, the title is simply "To understand Nadsat."



In Art and Technology class, we watched numerous clips from A Clockwork Orange, the 1971 film adaptation of Burgess' book (which was written in 1962).  The violent beat-up scenes didn't affect me too much - maybe I'm desensitized - but the rape scene certainly did.  Alex DeLarge, the main character, even sang "Singin' in the Rain" while he and his 'droogs' (Russian word meaning 'close friends') tortured the couple whose house they had invaded.  It was disturbing to watch someone take so much pleasure in humiliating and violating another in such a way, but that just goes to show how much of a turn the teenage society had taken during the nineteen years between 1952 when "Singin' in the Rain" came out and 1971 when A Clockwork Orange was released.

The large distinction between teenagers and adults in A Clockwork Orange  is also emphasized through the use of Nadsat.  The dialect is used only by the teenagers, separating them from the adults who don't understand it.  This makes the teens feel as though they surpass the adults and are on a higher level, which provides an interesting contrast to the fact that some of the Nadsat words are very childlike and immature.  Nadsat vocabulary isn't only influenced by Russian, however - Burgess also made up words himself with a few German additions as well as Cockney rhyming slang.

Burgess knew that if he wrote A Clockwork Orange in the typical language of the day, his book would be unable to keep up with the constantly-changing modern English language.  Creating Nadsat was the solution, because its words would never become old over time.  Each new reader or viewer of the film would discover it as something they had never encountered before, and that was exactly what Burgess wanted.