What, what? What?

We are a society now where people say, “sort of,”, “kind of,” “in a way,” “I mean ,” “I mean to say,” “you see,” all those things — over and over and over again — like the gossiping women who say, “She said, she said, she said …” They’re a kind of stuttering, a kind of self-imposed idiocy, a kind of pretense very often found in people trying to show that they are just like everybody else — quite stupid really. Stupidity in a democratic society as a whole produces pseudo-stupidity in its leaders, with appalling results. Once there is television in the House of Commons — and I hope it will never happen — everybody there will be pretending to be as stupid  as their electorates. This kind of manipulative pretense at being more stupid than the other person was first noticed by Wyndham Lewis in the twenties and documented in the speech of Bertie Wooster.

–Arthur Henry King, The Abundance of the Heart

I say, I can’t quite make out what Professor King is saying here, what? But I have the unsettling impression that I should feel insulted, in a way.