One small pleasure of mine is careless language. “A canary in a minefield,” “a hard road to hoe,” and “to all intensive purposes” can always make me chuckle, no matter how often I hear them. In addition, I love the dying metaphor, described by George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language”:

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

The sloppiness of dying-metaphor use was illustrated yesterday by The New York Times columnist William Kristol in the very title of his op-ed “A Star Is Born."