From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions:
The most direct sign of decay is, for me at any rate, the confusion of language. I am not thinking of the present-day Tower of Babel in which it is only natural that innumerable, mutually unintelligible specialist jargons of science and scholarship are heard. But consider the language of advertising, which is also that of politics, the language of daily life, the language in which letters are written now. One has the choice between the constipated rumble of Pravda and the more diarrheal fluidity of our own politicians, journalists, and other advertisers: everywhere a complete alienation from what human language used to be. No guilty party can be named; we fall, as we fall: is it Kismet? Twenty-five hundred years ago Master Kung recognized clearly that it is the disorder of the language that produces the disorder of the state. It is written in The Analects of Confucius (Waley translation):
If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then rites and music will not flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, then punishments will go astray. And if punishments go astray, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. Therefore the gentleman uses only such language as is proper for speech, and only speaks of what it would be proper to carry into effect. The gentleman, in what he says, leaves nothing to mere chance.
I should be sorry if these words led to the conclusion that all that Master Kung’s gentleman lacked was a word processor.