With your rivals from prudence; with others for the sake of appearance. There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one. Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words the less litigation... He who speaks lightly soon falls or fails.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Words are one-directional. Once said they cannot be recalled, only added to, and the addition rarely repairs the original. This is why the careful speak as if drafting a will: fewer words, each chosen, because every loose one is a future dispute waiting to be quoted back. The counsel is heaviest around rivals, who store what you say for use, and in public, where the archive is permanent. The habit to build is a small delay, the half-second in which the unnecessary sentence, the one said to fill silence or score a point, gets caught before it leaves. Silence is always retractable. Speech never is.
Practice
- Install the half-second pause before speaking in charged rooms; most regretted sentences die in that gap if you let them.
- Prefer under-saying; you can add tomorrow, but you can never unsay today (maxim 105 keeps it brief anyway).
- Around rivals and in writing, treat every sentence as quotable, because it is; say nothing you would not want read aloud later.
Use this when
- Use this in negotiations, disputes, and any room containing someone who benefits from your indiscretion.
- Use it doubly in writing and online, where the words are not just remembered but timestamped and forwardable (maxim 146 knows how far the fast version travels).
Ignore this when
- Don't mistake care for evasion; the plain necessary truth still gets said, just cleanly and once (maxim 210 doses the hard ones).
- Don't go mute among friends; guarded speech everywhere becomes coldness, and the will-drafting register is for the rooms that require it.
A picture of it
At a farewell dinner, loosened by the occasion, a manager makes one sharp joke about a client's internal troubles, the kind of line that feels harmless among colleagues. It reaches the client within a week, sharpened in the retelling, and no amount of added explanation recalls it; the account cools and never quite warms again. The words had cost nothing to say and years to survive. A colleague at the same table, equally merry, had simply kept the will-drafting habit, and had nothing come back to him at all.
Say less, choose each word, and remember that silence is the only thing you can always take back.