For want of a diplomat…

Diplomacy, which is now an underpaid and ill-supplied professsion, requires more than the ability to put a perpetually good face on ugly facts or evil intentions; it requires an awareness of other’s minds which is one of the chief attributes of the prose writer, second only to his capacity for meeting argument with finesse and clear reason. A self-centered diplomat, an incoherent diplomat, are contradictions in terms. Yet one wonders whence the recruits to such a calling will come when it is so ill-rewarded, when the study of foreign languages is hampered by the abolition of the native grammar, and when more and more of our university students can barely rank as monoglots.

The House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun (1959)

The common man soon acquires a vocabulary in excess of his needs, thanks to which he is never at a loss for the wrong word.

ibid.