Monday, July 23, 2012

"Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words."

Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words.  In a healthy condition of language a man finds it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not to use them.  These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he has begun to think at all.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

H/T  this Chesterton FB page

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