Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

Overprecision is De Vries's polite word for a kind of linguistic vanity: the sentence so manicured it stops being alive. The cookie-cutter image lands because it turns a supposed virtue - exact diction - into a factory process. You can picture the result: flawless edges, identical outcomes, no heat, no risk. In De Vries's hands, "somewhat" is doing sly work too, narrowing the target to writers who fetishize correctness just past the point of usefulness, where style becomes compliance.

The subtext is a warning about how "good writing" gets socially enforced. Over precise diction isn't just an aesthetic choice; it's a bid for authority. It signals education, class, seriousness. De Vries, a novelist with a comedian's eye for human posing, punctures that performance: language polished to impress often ends up sounding like everyone else who learned the same polish. The cookie cutter doesn't only standardize pastries; it standardizes taste.

Contextually, De Vries wrote in a mid-century American literary culture that prized the well-made sentence and the "proper" voice - at the same time mass media was rapidly homogenizing speech and opinion. His jab hits both worlds: the workshop perfectionism of the literary set and the broader cultural drift toward templates. It's an argument for precision with personality, not precision as a substitute for it. The best diction isn't the most exact; it's the most chosen.