I think that a cardinal linguistic sin is pretentiousness, and I love it when the pretentious slip up. Then there's obscurantism. The whole purpose of language is to communicate, and it behoves us to do it in a way that makes it easy for the recipient to grasp our meaning. If we have to wrestle with what someone has said or written before we can understand it, the perpetrator has simply been rude. Obviously, in some fields of human endeavour it's necessary to use technical terms or words that are unfamiliar to most, which is fine and not what I'm talking about, though occasionally I suspect that legalese is used more as an attempt to confuse than to communicate ideas clearly....

This little beauty popped up here recently:

"Art, independent of the artist, can supersede the sublime."

Well no amount of anguished mental processing by me revealed what was meant by that. Maybe I'm just thick!