Words' Resurgence

I'm reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  It's a (slightly fictionalized, it turns out) telling of his time being poor in... Paris and London.  Good book, and even though I sometimes disagree with Orwell I never regret the time I spent reading him.

Two big thoughts have struck me:

1) I could make a lot of money compiling a guide to English funny currency.  What the hell is a bob?  And a crown?  What's five and sixpence mean?  And a quid?  (In fact, I know the answers to most of these).  But a Creative Commons-licensed (non-commercial) essay describing the universe and lexicon, along with a per-decade commentary on economics (so you can know how much 4 pounds is in each time period, say) would be awesome.  I imagine that, written well enough, and licensed cheaply enough, you could allow editors to include it in editions of... basically any English Literature book ever.

2) I got to this passage:  "And instantly [] the tramps began to misbehave[]. All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered..."  Loll is a verb, meaning to lounge around, but in that context it seemed so much to presage "lol" as in "omfg lol" that I wondered if I hadn't gotten a copy of the book remixed a la Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.  It just all worked so well:  a book about tramps that was in the context of laughing by a writer who thought so much about language (yes, 1984, but also its underappreciated precursor "Politics and the English Language".

So, George (nee Eric), tell me, is newspeak really a foreshadowing of teenage girl speak?  My hat, as ever, is off to you.