Old Reprobates

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning.  It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.  Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.

-- William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), Irish symbolist poet, dramatist and mystic, 1923 Nobel laureate in Literature, Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)