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MOST PEOPLE WHO BOTHER with the matter at all would admit that theEnglish language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed thatwe cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Ourcivilization is decadent, and our language--so the argumentruns--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It followsthat any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimentalarchaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabsto aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief thatlanguage is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shapefor our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language mustultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simplyto the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But aneffect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause andproducing the same effect in an intensified form, and so onindefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself tobe a failure, and then fail all the more completely because hedrinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to theEnglish language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because ourthoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes iteasier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that theprocess is reversible. Modern English, especially written English,is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can beavoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If onegets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to thinkclearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration:so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is notthe exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back tothis presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what Ihave said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are fivespecimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they areespecially bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--butbecause they illustrate various of the mental vices from which wenow suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairlyrepresentative samples. I number them so that I can refer back tothem when necessary:
(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that theMilton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley hadnot become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year,more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothingcould induce him to tolerate.

PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a nativebattery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations ofvocables as the Basic put up with or tolerate or put at a loss orbewilder.

PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN (Interglossa)
(3) On the one side we have the free personality; by definition itis not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Itsdesires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just whatinstitutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness;another institutional pattern would alter their number andintensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, orculturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itselfis nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secureintegrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the verypicture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall ofmirrors for either personality or fraternity?

ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY in Politics (New York)
(4) All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all thefrantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism andbestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionarymovement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism,to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their owndestruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitatedpetty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fightagainst the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

COMMUNIST PAMPHLET
(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, thereis one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, andthat is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidityhere will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart ofBritain may lee sound and of strong beat, for instance, but theBritish lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom inShakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream--as gentle as any suckingdove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to betraduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effetelanguors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standardEnglish." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock,better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestlydropped 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 apartfrom 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 heinadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent asto whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture ofvagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristicof modern English prose, and especially of any kind of politicalwriting. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete meltsinto the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speechthat are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of wordschosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrasestacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. Ilist below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by meansof which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought byevoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which istechnically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect revertedto being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between thesetwo classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which havelost all evocative power and are merely used because they savepeople the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examplesare: 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, fishingin troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swansong, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of theirmeaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatiblemetaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is notinterested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current havebeen twisted out of their original meaning without those who usethem even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line issometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer andthe anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil getsthe worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: awriter who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware ofthis, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble ofpicking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time padeach sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance ofsymmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militateagainst, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to,give rise to, give grounds for, having the effect of, play aleading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit atendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is theelimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, suchas break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made upof a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passivevoice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, andnoun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination ofinstead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down bymeans of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements aregiven an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced bysuch phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that,by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesisthat; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by suchresounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be leftout of account, a development to be expected in the near future,deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactoryconclusion, 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 andgive an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable,triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used todignify the sordid processes of international politics, whilewriting that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaiccolor, 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, ancienregime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo,gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of cultureand elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., andetc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreignphrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especiallyscientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly alwayshaunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander thanSaxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate,predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous andhundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxonopposite 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 phrasestranslated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way ofcoining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with theappropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It isoften easier to make up words of this kind (de-regionalize,impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than tothink up the English words that will cover one's meaning. Theresult, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which theEnglish flower names which were in use till very recently are beingousted by Greek ones, snap-dragon becoming antirrhinum,forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see anypractical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due toan instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vaguefeeling that the Greek word is scientific.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularlyin art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to comeacross long passages which are almost completely lacking inmeaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead,sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, arestrictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not pointto any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do soby the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature ofMr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's workis its peculiar deadness, the reader accepts this as a simpledifference of opinion If words like black and white were involved,instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at oncethat language was being used in an improper way. Many politicalwords are similarly abused. The word Fascism has nowno meaning except in so far as it signifies "something notdesirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic,realistic, justice, have each of them several different meaningswhich cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a wordlike democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but theattempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almostuniversally felt that when we call a country democratic we arepraising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régimeclaim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stopusing the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words ofthis kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is,the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allowshis hearer to think he means something quite different. Statementslike Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is thefreest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution,are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used invariable 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 inaesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmosphericaccumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness. . . Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes withprecision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contentedsadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation."(Poetry Quarterly.)

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles andperversions, let me give another example of the kind of writingthat they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginaryone. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modernEnglish of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse fromEcclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to theswift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men ofskill; but time and chance happeneth

Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels theconclusion that success or failure in competitive activitiesexhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, butthat a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably betaken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3),above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind ofEnglish. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation.The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the originalmeaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concreteillustrations--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 onecapable of using phrases like objective consideration ofcontemporary phenomena"--would ever tabulate his thoughts in thatprecise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose isaway from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a littlemore closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables,and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, andone from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, andonly one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. Thesecond contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spiteof its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of themeaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is thesecond kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English.I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yetuniversal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there inthe worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a fewlines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably comemuch nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one fromEcclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does notconsist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning andinventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consistsin gumming together long strips of words which have already beenset in order by someone else, and making the results presentable bysheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it iseasy. It is easier--even quicker, once you have the habit--to sayIn my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to sayI think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have tohunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with therhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally soarranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composingin a hurry--when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance,or making a public speech--it is natural to fall into apretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which weshould do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of uswould readily assent will save many a sentence from coming downwith a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you savemuch mental effort at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, notonly for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance ofmixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visualimage. When these images clash--as in The Fascist octopus has sungits swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot--it canbe taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image ofthe 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 theseis superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and inaddition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense,and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase thegeneral vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes witha battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, whiledisapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling tolook egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), ifone takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simplymeaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning byreading the whole of the article inwhich it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what hewants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him liketea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almostparted company. People who write in this manner usually have ageneral emotional meaning--they dislike one thing and want toexpress solidarity with another--but they are not interested in thedetail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in everysentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions,thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? Whatimage or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough tohave an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could Iput 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 itby simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-madephrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences foryou--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent-and atneed they will perform the important service of partiallyconcealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this pointthat the special connection between politics and the debasement oflanguage becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is badwriting. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that thewriter is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions andnot a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demanda lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found inpamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White Papers and thespeeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party toparty, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds inthem a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watchessome tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiarphrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, freepeoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has acurious feeling that one is not watching a live human being butsome kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger atmoments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turnsthem into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. Andthis is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind ofphraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into amachine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, buthis brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing hiswords for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he isaccustomed to make over and over again, he may be almostunconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters theresponses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, ifnot indispensable, is at any rate favorable to politicalconformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely thedefense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of Britishrule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping ofthe atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only byarguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and whichdo not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thuspolitical language has to consist largely of euphemism,question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villagesare bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into thecountryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire withincendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions ofpeasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along theroads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer ofpopulation or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned foryears without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to dieof scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination ofunreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants toname things without calling up mental pictures of them. Considerfor instance some comfortable English professor defending Russiantotalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing offyour 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 certainfeatures which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, wemust, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right topolitical opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitionalperiods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have beencalled upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere ofconcrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass ofLatin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring theoutlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clearlanguage is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real andone's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to longwords and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. Inour age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." Allissues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies,evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the generalatmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect tofind--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge toverify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have alldeteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result ofdictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corruptthought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, evenamong people who should and do know better. The debased languagethat I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient.Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to bedesired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which weshould do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, apacket of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again andagain committed the very faults I am protesting against. By thismorning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditionsin Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to writeit. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence thatI see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving aradical transformation of Germany's social and political structurein such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germanyitself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of acooperative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" towrite--feels, presumably, that he has something new to say--and yethis words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, groupthemselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. Thisinvasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations,achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one isconstantly on guard against them, and every such phraseanesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probablycurable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced anargument at all, that language merely reflects existing socialconditions, and that we cannot influence its development by anydirect tinkering with words and constructions. So far as thegeneral tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but itis not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have oftendisappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to theconscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were exploreevery avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by thejeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blownmetaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough peoplewould interest themselves in the job; and it should also bepossible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 toreduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, todrive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, ingeneral, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these areminor points. The defense of the English language implies more thanthis, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does notimply.
3 One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing thissentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit acrossa not ungreen field.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with thesalvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with thesetting-up of a "standard-English" which must never be departedfrom. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with thescrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness.It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are ofno importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with theavoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "goodprose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fakesimplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nordoes it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to theLatin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest wordsthat will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to letthe meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose,the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them. Whenyou think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, ifyou want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, youprobably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fitit. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined touse words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort toprevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do thejob for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing yourmeaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long aspossible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through picturesor sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--thephrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round anddecide what impressions one's words are likely to make on anotherperson. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixedimages, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbugand vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about theeffect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can relyon when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover mostcases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech whichyou 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 wordif 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 adeep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing inthe style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and stillwrite bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff thatI 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 forconcealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have comenear to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and haveused this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism.Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle againstFascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but oneought to recognize that the present political chaos is connectedwith the decay of language, and that one can probably bring aboutsome improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplifyyour English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you makea stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.Political language-and with variations this is true of allpolitical parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed tomake lies sound truthful and murder respectable. and to give anappearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all ina moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and fromtime to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send someworn-out and useless phrase--some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed,melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbalrefuse--into the dustbin where it belongs.