From Sunday's New York Times, I learned of "the maelstrom unleashed" by the writer Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir. I might not have noticed this but for the Charybdis of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. How does one unleash or leash a whirlpool? It reminded me of a passage from one of T.S. Eliot's essays. I had to use the internet to find it, for the essay on Byron is not in the books I have:
Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘pandemonium’: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.
I don't think that the Times in general employs a dead or dying language: but bits of its language are in poor shape.
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