“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.” George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
“You don’t understand the beauty of the destruction of words. ... Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it. ... Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?” George Orwell, 1984
Official Semantic Spaghetti
(a sonnet in the style of Edmund Spencer's Amoretti)
The fabled Fascist octopus has not
its swan-song sung, nor has the brownshirt thug
his jackboot thrown into the melting pot.
Instead, with shoulders to the wheel they shrug
and disconnect the dots so as to mug
the truth, dispensing drivel by design:
mixed-metaphors a feature, not a bug.
For, given their longstanding plan malign,
the wealthy pigs can call the people swine
who fear the very shadow that they cast
on cloudy days. They see the darkness shine
who have no recollection of the past.
So tipping-points will turn the corner till
the tunnel at Light’s end has Time to kill.
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2012