I before E, unless you mean E.G.

Eugene Volokh notes the existence of people who are unclear on the difference between i.e. and e.g. The first is the abbreviation of the Latin "id est", or "that is". The second is the abbreviation for "exempli gratia", meaning "for example". There is a little bit of overlap in their meaning, but nowhere enough to make the two interchangeable, in Latin or in English.

In a business writing course, we spent some time with a quiz on words and phrases that were often confused with each other, e.g., "infer" and "imply", "perimeter" and "parameter", s**t and Shinola. (I don't recall which word it was, but there was one where I turned out to be right, and the instructor was wrong – over the lunch break, I printed out the definition from onelook.com and brought it back with me.)

The advice we were given as a class was two-fold: 1) be aware that these words and phrases don't mean quite what you may think they do, and 2) if you do know what they mean, be aware that your reader may not, and you might want to consider not using them.

My first reaction: FEH!

My second reaction:

...continued in full post...

Still "Feh!"

It's a declaration of surrender to the mediocrity of your reader.

While it's possible to emit prose so turgid it obviates any semblance of penetrability, I don't see the point of abandoning perfectly good words – words that mean precisely what you want to say (not just approximately), merely because someone in your audience might have to get his lazy rear end to a dictionary.

Many years ago, I read an article on how to build your vocabulary. It discussed the notion of "threshold words". These were words that you encountered on occasion in your day-to-day reading, but whose meaning you didn't fully know. You were encouraged to look those words up in the dictionary, and possibly explore any synonyms that might be listed.

You would emerge with a clear understanding of the word, and it would be a word you actually had a use for on a regular basis.

It seems to me this can work in reverse, as well.

If you make a point of abandoning words because they are "threshold words" for too many people, you will wind up shrinking your vocabulary until you are speaking and writing something more reminiscent of Newspeak than English.

Once again, FEH!