You're listening to the Corbett Report.

Corbett Report. Corbett.com. In our time it is broadly true that the political writing is bad writing.

Where it is not true it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel,

expressing his private opinions and not a party line.

Orthodoxy of whatever color seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

Political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, white papers,

and the speeches of undersecretaries do of course vary from party to party.

But they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform,

mechanically repeating the familiar phrases,

beastial atrocities,

Iron, heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world,

stand shoulder to shoulder.

One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.

A 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.

And this is not altogether fanciful.

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself

into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were

choosing his words for himself.

If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be

almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.

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