Martin Luther writing to Erasmus in Bondage of the Will:
… your book is, in my estimation, so mean and vile, that I greatly feel for you for having defiled your most beautiful and ingenious language with such vile trash; and I feel an indignation against the matter also, that such unworthy stuff should be borne about in ornaments of eloquence so rare; which is as if rubbish, or dung, should be carried in vessels of gold and silver.
Gotta love it. Luther may be called many things, but a mincer of words? Not on your life.
I tend to think if writers back then were too vitriolic (an imperfect generalization), writers today are too soft and thin-skinned (another imperfect generalization). By and large we can’t stand to say anything remotely critical. An injection of Luther would do us all good!
Well said.
Luther and his use of dung in his vocabulary…