"Obama's speech to Gen44 tonight knocked my socks off.... If you've forgotten why many of you worked your ass off for this guy..."

Socks off... ass off...

You can discuss the substance of Andrew Sullivan's new celebration of the amazing oratory of Barack Obama, but I see this as an occasion to reprint what I consider to be the single most useful item of advice in George Orwell's essential essay "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Background:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

I, the reader, am interested... and totally distracted by an assless man running around barefoot.

Ron Paul! You need to come speak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yesterday, after the faculty meeting, I walked down Bascom Hill, which was extremely well-posted with student activist posters....


(Enlarge.)

... including this one, which is horrifying for so many reasons...



"Fast Trains Are Cool." As if the government should provide us with everything, even coolness. Big Brother loves you, and Big Brother will also supply the coolness that's currently missing in your gray little life. Wow! We can go fast. Train go fast. Student not think about who pay for cool fast train. Ride train. Train cool.

I kept walking, down to library mall, where I was accosted by a guy with a clipboard, a sort of campus character I would normally discreetly evade, but he was part of a group of students I'd noticed earlier, telling people it was Constitution Day, and therefore we ought to sign a petition to bring Ron Paul to campus to speak, so I stop...



... and even sign the petition. He tells me Ron Paul has said that if students collect 1000 signatures, he'll come to the campus to speak. I ask him if he's finding many conservative or libertarian students on this campus. He admits that there don't seem to be too many, but that he does think the students these days are pretty open-minded and interested in hearing different points of view. Is it possible that the new generation of UW students is more flexible and less rigidly committed to left/liberal ideology? He thought so. I asked if I could take his picture, and I got the picture above, and that sparked this convergence...



... and I asked if it was okay if I blogged them, and the answer was "Blog?!" as if it were 2004 again. I felt young. Cool. On my own. Without a fast train or a Big Brother. And I'm thinking: Ron Paul! Come to the University of Wisconsin! I need to blog this to help get Ron Paul to the University of Wisconsin to talk to our possibly really open-minded young people before they get swept too far by the empty promises of cool things. Before they get... railroaded.

An idiomatic expression gone wrong... and Rush Limbaugh is mystified and amused.

On Monday, Rush was riffing on that Maureen Dowd column about The Sherrod Incident, which had this quote from Congressman John Lewis about Shirley Sherrod and her husband Charles:

“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies”....

Rush stresses the image:

... the media is holding Charles Sherrod up as a paragon of virtue. And John Lewis said that there's not a hair of racism on his head or anywhere else on his body. It's the first time I've ever heard anybody say that. There['s] not a shred of racism any hair on his head, or the rest of the body. What's Lewis thinking when he says that? 

He pauses to let us try to picture all the body hair Lewis has strangely conjured up for us to contemplate the possible racism of.

I can't explain everything about The Sherrod Incident, but I can explain Lewis's linguistic mishap. He began by mixing up 2 common idiomatic expressions: 1. not a [blank] bone in his body, and 2. wouldn't harm a hair on his/her head.

Having said "not a racist hair on their heads," Lewis must have realized that it didn't work the way it was supposed to. It didn't say there's absolutely nothing racist about them, because people have a lot more hair than just on their heads. By going with hair on their heads instead of bones, it's as if he were saying: in the part of them we can see, there's no racism. To avoid creating the implication that there was hidden racism, he had to vouch for the racism-free nature of the rest of their hair. So he tacked on "or anyplace else on their bodies."

This is a good time to remember that great piece of advice about language: "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Use original images or avoid metaphor, and you won't get into weird troubles of the "anyplace else on their bodies" sort.

***

Also: Don't be a racist.

Big Teacher Is Watching You.

"School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home."

***

Orwell presaged it:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now."

"There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

#2 on the list of most depressing quotes from George Orwell's "1984."

Linked in the comments to this Metafilter post on an article titled "The masterpiece that killed George Orwell."

"George Orwell once observed, brilliantly, that every joke is a tiny revolution."

"So are the best political blogs – that’s why so many powerful people want to silence them."

(Link via Instapundit.)

"After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm..."

"... in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

The "Animal Farm" rejection letter, written by T.S. Eliot.

David Axelrod, circa 1975.

(Via Ben Smith.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O Cruel, needless misunderstanding. O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast..."

ricpic said:

Oscar Wilde lives! Sans wit. Sans soul. Sans everything.

Love all that literariness, but Psychedelic George hits what I was searching for:

Separated at Birth from

Chuck Negron

3 Dog Night's lead singer.

(Idle Chuck Negron rumor.)

He also bears a resemblance to Mickey Rat of comix fame.

Lem said:

If you put a moustache on this man you will not be able to tell them apart.

Actually, he looks more like Rasputin than the Son of Sam....

David Crosby....

What book that you've read is most different on second reading?

This is a question that occurs to me while reading (and looping back in) George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." It's so sad, on first read, all the sufferings of poverty. The second time around, I see humor everywhere. It's uncanny!