The other day I formatted a sentence out loud in the "it's not just x it's y" structure and immediately felt gross, despite having done it probably a million times in my lifetime. That was an out-of-body feeling.

In George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," [0] one of his primary recommendations for writing well is to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

"It's not just X, it's Y" definitely seems to qualify today. It's a stale way to express an idea.

I hadn't revisited that essay since LLMs became a thing, but boy was it prescient:

> By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms [and LLMs], you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

[0]: https://bioinfo.uib.es/~joemiro/RecEscr/PoliticsandEngLang.p...

When I notice that I change it to "it's y, not just x" just to catch others off guard :).