I think Orwell was spot on when he discussed the destruction of words as a tool of authoritarian control. There's a whole thread on Tangency about rethinking geek speak. I think what they're missing is that they've gotten old and now, like the mothers who were frothing at the mouth about satanism in the eighties, they're frothing in a panic over stuff.
I think Orwell was... well, not wrong, but off a little bit. I think that the left sees itself is a state of perpetual revolution, even though they have power they don't have POWAH, so they are still revolutionaries fighting 'the man', whomever that is.
It is characteristic of revolutionaries, at least as far back as Thucydides (I've pointed this out here in the past), to corrupt language to disguise what they are doing, and you know the revolution is over, one way or another, when language gets 'fixed', because whomever wins inevitably re-asserts the common understanding of words as soon as they have power (or in this case POWAH).
Orwell is only right because the authoritarians are also the rebels. Once they've succeeded in setting up some sort of absolute feudal state and reduced the rest of us to primitive serfs working the land under their new regime (having gotten rid of that pesky ambitious and freedom loving middle class...), then they'll hate weird weasel words and 'that depends on what "is" means' language in a heart beat, to shut down the next group of revolutionaries that comes down the pipe.