wet sponges and the dark abysm of pish

I was looking up the origins of "butt-hurt" on Urban Dictionary to prove a point when I ran across this:

"H.L. Mencken said of U.S. President Warren G. Harding, '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 the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.'"

I wish that the pressure visual artists experience to prove their dedication to craft through slavish repetition or to make the same point continuously for a lifetime did not cause us to toss succinctness out the window. Also, "flap and doodle" is now my go-to private assessment of most things.