[Terriergal]

I found this:

Lewis enlarges a bit on the point in Studies in Words:

"The language which can with the greatest ease make the finest and most
numerous distinctions of meaning, is the best. It is better to have *like*
and *love* than to have *aimer* for both. It was better to have the older
English distinction between 'I haven't got indigestion' (I am not
suffering from it at the moment) and 'I don't have indigestion' (I am not
a dyspeptic) than to level both, as America has now taught most Englishmen
to do, under 'I don't have' ... Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens
in many ways ... the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most
people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and
disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words
to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative,
while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness
implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for
good or for bad ... *Rotten*, paradoxically has become so completely a
synonym for 'bad' that we now have to say *bad* when we mean 'rotten.'"

[Terriergal]

from C.S. Lewis to his pupil Ken Tynan:

Keep a strict eye on eulogistic and dyslogistic adjectives. They should *diagnose* (not merely blame) and *distinguish* (not merely praise). Deploy paradox and utilize accurate firepower.