Don't Use Big Words

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical, or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, a coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectation. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade, or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscure or apparent. In other words, talk plainly, briefly, naturally, truthfully, purely. Keep from " slang"; don't put on airs ; say what you mean ; mean what you say. And don't use big words.

— Pennsylvania School Journal, May, 1875.