In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell excoriated clichés, writing that “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.”

He worried about tired phrases such as “axe to grind,” but one cliché Orwell never lived to see was the invocation of his seminal dystopian novel, 1984.