Goofy, it was written way back in the forties when all the annoying phrases seemed (to him at least) to be "rearing their ugly heads"...his essay style is true to proper form, being more an intelligent conversation put down in words and in such a way as to make his point most profoundly. Orwell is a great master of essays and the comic and ironic streak can be seen in all of his essays. He is mainly annoyed with the people who destroy the meaning of what they say by not being imaginative and creating their own metaphors and thus bogging down their writing into a practically unintelligible babble of polysyllabic sesquipedilian foreign inanities. (Apologies for the typos etc and the length. Am typing this from my phone and you kind of lose track of length and spelling...!) wink

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