Sublime

As for the area where our Usage Panel was conservative, we upheld most of the classic distinctions in grammar—“can” and “may,” “fewer” and “less,” “eldest” and “oldest,” etc.—and decried the classic errors, insisting that “flout” still doesn’t mean “flaunt,” no matter how many writers flaunt their ignorance by flouting the rule, and that

To conceal meaning (it was reasoned) is equally to conceal lack of meaning….

In high school I had to study William Strunk’s classic The Elements of Style. Strunk’s most incisive command was “Omit needless words.” In business, and other organizations, the parallel is “Omit needless activities.”

Language,” an essay written in 1946 but often cited during the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell’s warning that clutter is not just a nuisance but a deadly

I don’t suggest that you have to be a poet, but you won’t climb the ladder very high unless you can write lucid memoranda. I persuaded two of my partners to write a book on the subject. I commend it to you.1

Here’s a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often just one word got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb (“order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb (“smile happily”), or the adjective that states a