I remember Nero Wolfe pitching a fit over the use of "contact" as a verb.
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12 Horrible Gobbledygook Words We Reluctantly Accepted – Mental Floss
12 Horrible Gobbledygook Words We Reluctantly AcceptedTomorrow, for 12-12-12, we’ll be posting twenty-four (!) ’12 lists’ throughout the day. Here’s an early one to get everyone sufficiently exci…
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That he did. Remember when Archie had to prepare a client to meet Wolfe on a dark day in 1962?
“Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It’s complicated. There’s a fireplace in the front room, but it’s never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it’s lit now because he’s using it. He’s seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the — I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad.”