node created 2019/09/29
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. [..] But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline 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 spurting out ink.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.