Less Isn't Always More

“‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.”

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Of the Dennis Prager essay that the above passage links to, Dr. Sanity writes:

Praeger still refers to them as “liberals”, a term I am careful not to use to describe the left. The classical liberal tradition is alive and well elsewhere–permeating both neoconservative and libertarian intellectual thought.

I try to make the same distinction whenever possible as well. And for the moment that most FDR/New Frontier-style liberals began to shed the last vestiges of classical liberalism, click here.