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. 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 w