The problem with using idioms to look clever is you look even worse if you get it wrong.
Wait, isn't this book meant to be about a guy murdering an old woman? Photo: Getty Images
"The problem with quotations on the internet", Abraham Lincoln famously said, "is that you can never tell if they're real or not."
Simon Jenkins'column today over at Comment Is Free contains an apt illustration of Lincoln's maxim:
Readers may recognise the quotation Jenkins paraphrases as: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It comes, of course, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - it's the opening line of the opening chapter.