Some of the best writing is about bad writing. This is unsurprising, I think, because the quality of prose cannot be proved with theorems and a slide rule; to establish authority on the subject of good writing versus bad, the author must demonstrate his own skill and taste. Today I’ll share two examples of such linguistic showmanship. The first comes from George Orwell, in his brilliant essay on bad writing called Politics and the English Language. One of my favorite sentences from it concerns the worst of “modern writing”:

It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

I can’t help but to think of this image when I come across some sentence that appears to have the tensile strength of papier mache. Given the resilience of that first image, I was a little disappointed in the second clause; “results” and “presentable”ness don’t fire up any sensory memories for me, and the final “humbug”–a unloved urchin of a word, beautiful in its ugliness–must bear the clause’s dramatic weight.

I think Orwell was trying to achieve an effect more like the following, one of the best linguistic invectives ever written. This passage has inspired many imperfect imitators, Orwell, perhaps, among them; its hyperbole is so electric, its imagery so sensible, its wordplay so unhinged that language itself seems inadequate to express the subject’s verbal turpitude. I refer to Warren G. Harding’s prose, condemned to eternal ignominy by H.L. Mencken, America’s finest wit after Twain. Since I can’t follow it, I’ll end with it. Mencken wrote:

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.