“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?  Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…”  George Orwell, 1984

Newspeak influences and limits thought by decreasing the range of expressiveness of the English language, by eliminating ambiguity and nuance from the language, and so reduce the language to simple concepts.  The user’s range of thought is diminished, realized with a minimal vocabulary of limited denotation and connotation.  This is done chiefly by eliminating undesirable words, and by stripping such words as remain of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.  [Wikipedia]

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more or less.”  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master–that’s all.”  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 

TBT on FB?  Any photo captioned “throwback” and posted by one whose memories are still live, and the feelings wanted to be expressed.  Throwback indicates the time which has passed, or things which happened in past time.  Now it is a time for re-feeling.  

Yes, it means something from the past.  More specifically, it usually means something that is nostalgic, something with memories, something back in the day, something old school.  

Throwback could be a sudden reminder of the past–a person or a thing–that seems to belong to an earlier period of time or that makes one think of an earlier period of time, not always necessarily in one’s own experience, like “a throwback to the 1950s when he saw a [1954] picture of me in my blue suede shoes.”

Perhaps it is simply a decorated birthday cake, or wedding dress–designs or “a reversion to an earlier ancestral characteristic.”  “Those tail lights on the new Ferrari remind me of…”   “Don’t her melodies remind you of early Joan Baez?”  “He stands like Shoeless Joe Jackson.”

A person or thing that is similar to an earlier type, like a…throwback.