A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics". All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
-George Orwell
Metaphor
Surely some revelation is at hand.
Metaphor 
There's no end to it. The latest victim of verbal murder is "surge." This word once had some power, describing ocean forces, thrusting loins, offensive lines at the goal. But it's ruined now, wrested from decent prose by Bush/Rove/Cheney and the obeisant MSM. Now a newsy shorthand for a politico/military maneuver, it's lost to us writers for at least a decade.