When a reader is forced to work through one stale idiom after another, she stops converting the language into mental images and slips back into just mouthing the words.13 Even worse, since a cliché-monger has turned off his own visual brain as he plonks down one dead idiom after another, he will inevitably mix his metaphors, and a reader who does keep her visual brain going will be distracted by the ludicrous imagery.
