Dan Klein’s Vocabulary Aphorism
Let your vocabulary be a source of pride not for the words it competently includes but for the words it scrupulously excludes.
A variation:
Sometimes a word remains outside a person's active vocabulary because she lacks the competence to include it, and sometimes because she has the competence to exclude it.
BTW, terms I exclude:
- positive/normative (and video conversation, PPT file)
- objective, subjective
- absolutism [ethical or moral]/relativism
- consequentialist, deontological (see here, final figure, a spiral)
- utilitarian
- rational
- homo economicus
- altruism
- capitalism (see here, #50)
- social justice
- pure theory
- trade deficit
- postmodernism
- the American revolution
A term I do not exclude as strictly but try to avoid:
- self-interest
Karl Kraus: "My language is the common street prostitute that I turn into a virgin."
(That Kraus quotation is among those I have collected here.)