One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English.

Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

Now they often walk with theirheads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children' everyone is ontheir own devices

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely' The opposite is true' If we areunable to be alone, we are far more fk"iy to be lonely' If we don't teach our children tobe alone, they will know only how to be lonely'1')LL: .. tt==*,t -; t: :;

"l shale, therefore I am'"

one who will listen whenothers won't.

A high school sophomorg tglld"t to methat he wishes te "orrlitalk to a; artificial intelligence program instead of his dad aboutdating;

"We are consum'd with that which we were nourish'd by'"

But they don't. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have theirplaces - in politics, commerce, romance und friendship.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be' This means we canedit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh' the face' the body'Not too much, not too liule -- just right

I'velearned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they changenot only what we do, but also who we are'

My students teli me about an iirportant new skill: it involves maintaining eyecontact with someone while you text ro*.o.r" else;