MOST PEOPLE WHO BOTHER with the matter at all would admit that the
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that
we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our
civilization is decadent, and our language--so the argument
runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows
that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental
archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs
to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that
language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape
for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must
ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply
to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an
effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and
producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to
be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he
drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our
thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the
process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English,
is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be
avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one
gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration:
so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not
the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to
this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I
have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five
specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are
especially bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--but
because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we
now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly
representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to
them when necessary:
(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the
Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had
not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year,
more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing
could induce him to tolerate.
PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in Freedom of
Expression)
(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native
battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of
vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for
bewilder.
PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN
(Interglossa)
(3) On the one side we have the free personality; by definition it
is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its
desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what
institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness;
another institutional pattern would alter their number and
intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or
culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself
is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very
picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of
mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY in Politics (New
York)
(4) All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the
frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and
bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary
movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism,
to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own
destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated
petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight
against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
COMMUNIST PAMPHLET
(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there
is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and
that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity
here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of
Britain may lee sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the
British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in
Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream--as gentle as any sucking
dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete
languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard
English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock,
better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly
dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited,
school-ma'am-ish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens.
LETTER IN Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart
from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as
to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic
of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political
writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts
into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech
that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words
chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases
tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I
list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means
of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought by
evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is
technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted
to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these
two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have
lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save
people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples
are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line,
ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing
in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan
song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their
meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible
metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not
interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have
been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use
them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is
sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and
the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets
the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a
writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of
this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of
picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad
each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of
symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate
against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to,
give rise to, give grounds for, having the effect of, play a
leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a
tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the
elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such
as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up
of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive
voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and
noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of
instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by
means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are
given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-
formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by
such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that,
by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis
that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left
out of account, a development to be expected in the near future,
deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory
conclusion, and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element,
individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual,
basis, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize,
eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and
give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.
Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable,
triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to
dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while
writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic
color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot,
mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot,
clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien
regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo,
gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture
and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and
etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign
phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially
scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always
haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than
Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate,
predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous and
hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon
opposite numbers.1 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena,
hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey,
mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases
translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of
coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the
appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is
often easier to make up words of this kind (de-regionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to
think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The
result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the
English flower names which were in use till very recently are being
ousted by Greek ones, snap-dragon becoming antirrhinum,
forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any
practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to
an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague
feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly
in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come
across long passages which are almost completely lacking in
meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead,
sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are
strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point
to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so
by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of
Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work
is its peculiar deadness, the reader accepts this as a simple
difference of opinion If words like black and white were involved,
instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once
that language was being used in an improper way. Many political
words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now
no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not
desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic,
realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings
which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word
like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost
universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are
praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime
claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop
using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of
this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is,
the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows
his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements
like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the
freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution,
are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in
variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are:
class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary bourgeois,
equality.
2 Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image,
strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in
aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric
accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness
. . . Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with
precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented
sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation."
(Poetry Quarterly.)
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and
perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing
that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary
one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern
English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from
Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the
conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities
exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but
that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be
taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3),
above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of
English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation.
The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original
meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete
illustrations--race, battle, bread--dissolve into the vague phrase
"success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so,
because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing--no one
capable of using phrases like objective consideration of
contemporary phenomena"--would ever tabulate his thoughts in that
precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is
away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little
more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables,
and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains
38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and
one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and
only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The
second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite
of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the
meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the
second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English.
I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet
universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in
the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few
lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come
much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and
inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists
in gumming together long strips of words which have already been
set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by
sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is
easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you have the habit--to say
In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say
I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to
hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the
rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so
arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing
in a hurry--when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance,
or making a public speech--it is natural to fall into a
pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us
would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down
with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save
much mental effort at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not
only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of
mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual
image. When these images clash--as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot--it can
be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of
the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay.
Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these
is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in
addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense,
and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the
general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with
a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while
disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to
look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if
one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by
reading the whole of the article in
which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he
wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like
tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost
parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a
general emotional meaning--they dislike one thing and want to
express solidarity with another--but they are not interested in the
detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions,
thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What
image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to
have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I
put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it
by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made
phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for
you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent-and at
need they will perform the important service of partially
concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point
that the special connection between politics and the debasement of
language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad
writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the
writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and
not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand
a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White Papers and the
speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to
party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in
them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches
some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar
phrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has a
curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but
some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at
moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns
them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And
this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of
phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but
his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his
words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is
accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost
unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if
not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political
conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the
defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British
rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of
the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by
arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which
do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages
are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with
incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the
roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die
of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to
name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider
for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off
your opponents when you can get good results by doing so."
Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain
features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we
must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to
political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional
periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been
called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of
concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of
Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the
outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear
language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and
one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long
words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In
our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All
issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies,
evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general
atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to
find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to
verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all
deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of
dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even
among people who should and do know better. The debased language
that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient.
Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be
desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a
packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through
this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and
again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this
morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions
in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write
it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that
I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a
radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure
in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany
itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a
cooperative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to
write--feels, presumably, that he has something new to say--and yet
his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group
themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations,
achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase
anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably
curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an
argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social
conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any
direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it
is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often
disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the
conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore
every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the
jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown
metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people
would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be
possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 to
reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to
drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in
general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are
minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than
this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not
imply.
3 One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this
sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across
a not ungreen field.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the
salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the
setting-up of a "standard-English" which must never be departed
from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the
scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness.
It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of
no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the
avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good
prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake
simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor
does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the
Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let
the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose,
the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them. When
you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if
you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you
probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit
it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to
use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to
prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the
job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your
meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as
possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures
or sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the
phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and
decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another
person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed
images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug
and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the
effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely
on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most
cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which
you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word
if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a
deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in
the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still
write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that
I quoted in these five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language,
but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for
concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come
near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have
used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism.
Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against
Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one
ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected
with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about
some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify
your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.
You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make
a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language-and with variations this is true of all
political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in
a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from
time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some
worn-out and useless phrase--some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed,
melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal
refuse--into the dustbin where it belongs.
B&L Associates, Renton, Washington, U.S.A.