William F. Buckley, Jr., April 14, 1973:
I guess I was seven when I first heard the maxim that only people with a small vocabulary use “dirty” words. I am forty-seven and have just received a communication from a reader delivering that maxim as though he had invented it. The trouble with the cliché as (a) it isn’t true; (b) it doesn’t take into account the need to use the resources of the language; and (c) the kind of people who use it are almost always engaged in irredentist ventures calculated to make “dirty” words and expressions that no longer are, and even some that never were.
from Buckley: The Right Word (Random House, 1996)
