"Urdu literary culture from the late eighteenth century on- ward does place an unfortunate stress, which is also entirely disproportion- ate to their value, on “purism,” “language reform,” “purging the language of undesirable usages,” and—worst of all—privileging all Persian-Arabic over all Urdu. Urdu is the only language whose writers have prided themselves on “deleting” or “excising” words and phrases from their active vocabulary. Instead of taking pride in the enlargement of vocabulary, they took joy in limiting the horizon of language, to the extent of banishing many words used even by literate speakers or their own ustads."