Long before Andy Rooney opened his yap on TV (the annoying Mr. Rooney is the main reason I quit watching 60 Minutes), a much more articulate man, George Orwell, wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language". Some selected remarks from that piece:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.â€

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks […] English […] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.â€

The Six Rules:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This was published in 1946. You can find it online at http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html