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Apropos of my Chomsky post, Tahl and I were discussing the multiform art of persuasion and who uses what tactic in order to turn a crowd. Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," needs updating. What is one to do about a creature like Noam Chomsky, whose mechanical style and permanent calm seem to many the wardrobe of objectivity and universal moral principles.

With born writers like Martin Amis, it's all about getting the language to out-perform itself at every opportunity. There is no such thing as a synonym, and cliches of expression are insidious for their confirmation of cliches of thought and feeling.

For instance, you can bang on about genocide and mass murder. You can trot out all the old adjectives to describe the gulag or Auschwitz — "horrific," "nightmarish," "incalculable," "unfathomable" — but watch what happens to the furniture in your head when you deploy a term like "species shame" to account for events that have been accounted for an, well, "incalculable" number of times already.

Here's a clip of Amis discussing his ongoing war against cliche with Charlie Rose. It's not just instructive. It's quite funny, too.

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