George Orwell has a famous essay called "Politics and the English Language," which is widely cited, discusses, and endorsed in all manner of situations. Across the intellectual landscape, in many different contexts, people endorse it as wonderful writing advice and an excellent critique of vapid political discourse.

Orwell puts forth several rules for clear writing, all of which are motivated by a modicum of reasoning. All of them, when followed to their conclusion, can only produce confused and impenetrable prose. Orwell admits that he does not always follow them—and of course the last rule gives the reader explicit permission to violate the rules in certain circumstances—but it very much makes one wonder what the point of "rules" are if they are made to be broken so regularly.

Let's look at each of these six rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Orwell's complaints about metaphor are twofold: one, that overuse of these metaphors robs them of their meaning, and two, that they can become divorced from their original metaphorical meaning and become abstract phrases.

The first objection presupposes that meaning is necessarily diminished through use, and in some cases, this may very well be true. The impact of a word like fuck is of course lessened if it is used incessantly, and phrases that necessarily connote some kind of unusualness or uniqueness—like Achilles' Heel, which connotes a unique but absolute weakness—can suffer a semantic shift such that they start to connote a less unique situation.

Those, however, are special cases. In general, meaning is not a quantity that diminishes with use—it is a quality that shifts, and no number of essays can prevent metaphors or even just words from shifting their meanings over time. This is no more or less true of figures of speech than it is of words: who today uses the word 'silly' to mean "blessed", or the word 'bonanza' to mean "fair weather at sea"¹?

As for the larger point: the reason that metaphors are useful is because they can take a situation and explicate it via similarity. A writer shouldn't overuse them, but on the other hand, why avoid a common metaphor if it is appropriate to the situation at hand? I could attempt to come up with an uncommon metaphor to describe the "flow of money"—money is not a liquid and does not flow!—but why do this when I could