Tuesday, August 06, 2024
Recipe for Invective
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 191-192:
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If you want to write invective and have found a subject who thoroughly deserves it, first, get mad; while furious, boil up the ideas and the crushing descriptions and the lava-flow of invective. Then calm down. Cool off. Reduce them to some form which will overwhelm your opponent: either a single phrase, or a double blast of heat, or an overpowering flow of rhetoric which will shrivel him to a cinder.
