For whatever it's worth, I took the "modest proposal" at face value and have never heard of the satirical association. Also I do rather like the idea of word groups basically meaning what the individual word meanings would indicate, as far as possible, though that's probably a losing battle.
Nowhere did I suggest to do away with all idioms. I just don't like the ones of the form "<adjective> <noun>", when the meaning is far from <adjective>.
It really was not, unless complete eradication of unfortunate language usages is the goal, which it is not.
There's a constant ebb and flow of bad usage and pushback. I only mentioned it's a losing battle because I think there should be a bit more ebb and a little less flow.
I think this passes under the rule of "common knowledge", at least for anyone in the field of linguistics or literature. The writing in question, A Modest Proposal, was written centuries ago, if you read the Christian Bible you can see examples of satire that are thousands of years old.
You may need to justify the "not terribly expressive" part, especially since the objection is limited to words that already have clear meanings (<adjective> <noun>) but for which the meaning is taken as the opposite.
As for the "bragging", you probably should read the comment again, there isn't anything in there that could be described as bragging. I'll also just posit that there's also such a thing as being well read without delving into Swift.
