Lucian Lexiphanes 24

[24] As for vanity, boastfulness and malice, blustering and bawling, away with them, and with girding at the works of all others and thinking that you yourself will be first if you carp at the achievements of everyone else.

Yes, and there is also this fault which you have, not a slight one, but rather the greatest possible: you do not prepare your thoughts in advance of your words and subsequently dress them out in the parts of speech, but if you find anywhere an outlandish expression or make one up yourself and think it pretty, you endeavour to fit the thought to it and think yourself damaged if you cannot stuff it in somewhere, even if it is not essential to what you are saying. For example, the other day, without even knowing what “‘scintilla” meant, you tossed it off when it had no relation at all to the subject, and the vulgar to a man were dazed when its unfamiliarity struck their ears, but the well-informed laughed, not only at you but at your admirers.

[24] Further, put a stopper on bombast and grandiloquence and mannerism; be neither supercilious nor overbearing; cease to carp at other people’s performances and to count their loss your gain. And then, perhaps the greatest of all your errors is this: instead of arranging your matter first, and then elaborating the diction, you find some out-of-the-way word, or are captivated by one of your own invention, and try to build up your meaning round it; if you cannot get it in somehow or other, though it may have nothing to do with the matter, you are inconsolable; do you remember the mobled queen you let off the other day? It was quite off the point, and you did not know what it meant yourself; however, its oddness tickled the ears of the ignorant many; as for the cultivated, they were equally amused at you and at your admirers.