THE USE OF LANGUAGE.
To Talleyrand has generally been attributed the authorship of the maxim that “the use of language is to conceal our thoughts.” (La parole a été donnée à l’homme pour aider à cacher sa pensée.)
In Pycroft’s Ways and Words of Men of Letters, a quotation is made from an article on The Use of Language, published in a periodical called the Bee, under date of October 20, 1759, which reads as follows: “He who best knows how to conceal his necessity and desires is the most likely person to find redress; and the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.”
Nearly a century before this, Dr. South preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey, on The Wisdom of the World, in which he said, “Men speak with designs of mischief, and therefore they speak in the dark. In short, this seems to be the true inward judgment of all our politic sages, that speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind, but to wise men whereby to conceal it.”