Prospero is aghast at a line from Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste:
“Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.” That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world’s worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause.
He suggests Mirowski revisit Orwell’s six rules of writing. Linguist Mark Liberman disagrees:
The most obvious problem with Mirowski’s sentence is its unpalatable stew of mixed metaphors: a nightmare is casting a shroud in the guise of a contagion of the sort of paralysis that afflicts a deer caught in the headlights of a car. That’s between four and seven distinct metaphorical systems in 19 words, depending on whether we take cast, guise, and paralysis to have any metaphorical force left. But Orwell’s rule doesn’t tell us not to mix metaphors, it tells us not to use them, or at least not to use metaphors that we’re “used to seeing in print.”
The Dish 