It's the way Justice Kennedy expressed his hate for the term "swing vote" that's so revealing.

"I hate that term... I get this visual image of spatial gyrations. The cases swing; I don’t."

The most revealing thing is not that he hates the term "swing vote." That's not surprising. He wants to be thought of as serious and consistent. The term impugns.

The most revealing thing is that in thinking about an abstraction, he gets a visual image and his thinking about an abstraction is, it seems, influenced by the way that abstraction-made-concrete looks in his mind.

This is useful for lawyers who are trying to figure out how to tip Kennedy one way or the other. Did "tip" just give you a visual image? If not, then you don't have the kind of mind that Kennedy seems to have.

Personally, I have this kind of mind, and I know very well how thought is influenced by language that generates images. The word "swing" makes Justice Kennedy picture a swing — picture himself as a swing, suspended, ungrounded, susceptible to pushes — and he hates (strong word!) how he looks in that image. Perhaps he sees himself as a child on a swing. Perhaps he sees himself as the bad guy in a western who's going to swing in a hangman's noose.

Stressing the vividness of the image as it appears in his mind, he indulges — even as he's speaking with notable concision — in a redundancy, adding the unnecessary adjective "visual" to "images."

So it seems that Justice Kennedy is one of these people for whom the metaphors within words feel alive. George Orwell wrote about dying metaphors in "Politics and the English Language":

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

What Orwell didn't say was that the effect of language varies from person to person. There is no objectivity to the perception whether a metaphor is fully alive, totally dead, or somewhere in the gray area between life and death.

The life of a metaphor is a subtle matter that belongs within the realm of the individual mind, including the mind of the man who (co)wrote: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Did he get a visual image of a heart, a beating heart of liberty? Did he see, within that heart, the universe? Did the image of the universe inside a heart blur into a mystery as he compared the universe inside a heart with the unborn baby inside a womb — two bodily organs containing — who's to say? — everything?

You may think the life of that baby is undeniably, concretely real, but do you understand how real liberty might look in the mind of a man who gets visual images?

ADDED: The Orwell quote contains the very phrase I marked as a redundancy: "A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image..."