I can’t say I have found a ton that I like about Belloc, but one thing I DO appreciate his his down-to-earth attitude and love of the common man. Here, he rails on people that refuse to use simple words and language in their effort to sound clever or sophisticated. Yes, a rich education and a deep vocabulary is good, but don’t use a ten-dollar sentence when a cliche that everyone knows will actually do just as well. You may earn a point in an essay writing class, but you won’t really be helping anyone.
You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the cliché and the commonplace, and the phrase toute faite. Why? Not because you naturally write odd prose–contrariwise, left to yourself you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school calls ‘distinction’ in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done, and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty wax–sometimes even they dictate to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and generally put the Queen’s English–yes, the Queen’s English–on the rack. And who is a penny the better for it?
-Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome, p.162