Get Your Words Right

I cannot make my days longer, so I strive to make them better.
Henry David Thoreau

I’m afraid some writers have twisted these great words into, “I cannot make my words better, so I strive to make them longer.” As George Orwell brilliantly put it: “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

In Doris Lessing’s novel...