If you perused our Ricochet House Style guide, you may have noticed this item:

• Terminate all clichés with extreme prejudice. The previous sentence, for example, should be terminated. “Social justice warrior” and other right-wing clichés should be replaced. TK: LIST OF RIGHT-WING CLICHÉS ALWAYS TO BE REPLACED

TK is a traditional editorial place-marker for “missing information to come,” by the way. It’s short for the intentional misspelling of “to come.” (Tokum, get it?) The origin of the symbol is shrouded in lore, but when pressed, editors will say that TK never comes up in everyday English, so it stands out; TC might be confused with Table of Contents; and besides, that’s just how we’ve always done it.

That section will probably forever be TK. I put it there because I’d been mentally compiling a list of soul-numbing right-wing clichés that make me itch to whip out the red pen. Yes, yes, I know: Left-wing clichés are worse. But we can only control our own clichés.

And we should, for as Comrade Stalin reminds us,

Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, 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 — bestial 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. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

What clichés do you think we ought to put on that list, if ever we get around to it? I suggested “social justice warrior,” as you saw. Whenever someone uses that one, I want to throw him under a bus.

— Squealing brakes! Shriek! Whooooosh, SPLAT! …  10-4. Area of Social Justice Park, 8th Avenue, 17th Street; stand-by for the other units. Attempt to serve. 10-4,  I’ll come up 19th Street onto 8th. 11-41 Ambulance needed, I repeat, 11 41 —

As I do anyone who uses the phrase “throwing someone under a bus” to mean anything but throwing someone under a bus.

— 10-53 road blocked at Social  Junction, BOLO Ricochet Copy Editor … Whoa, gonna need a mop out here. Officer Justice, are those … are those … are those Human Social Warrior entrails? I mean, in the tailpipe? —

There are a million yet-unwritten ways to express conservative ideas, ways that might be inventive enough to grab someone’s attention. But every time we use a drab, overused phrase that’s lost its power to change minds, shock, compel a new thought, or even properly to give insult, a fairy dies; a terrorist wins; Orwell’s dust spins below a weathering headstone streaked with lichen, mingling companionably with the dust of Asquith under a rolled lawn of repose at the north end of the Village Green.

He is strewn, from time to time, with a few wilted red carnations.