Jordan Dotson

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Presentable by sheer humbug

October 12, 2013 By Jordan

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.

…not all that different from modern sex, huh?

(from “Politics and the English Language,” by GeorgeĀ Orwell, whose fiction I’ve never read, and who apparently took himself way too seriously while being utterly correct.)

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Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: George Orwell