This should be a simple issue but I am struggling.

I have a vector of variable names that I want to exclude from a data frame:

```
df <- data.frame(matrix(rexp(50), nrow = 10, ncol = 5))
names(df) <- paste0(rep("variable_", 5), 1:5)

excluded_vars <- c("variable_1", "variable_3")

```

I would have thought that just excluding the object in the select statement with `-` would have worked:

```
select(df, -excluded_vars)

```

But I get the following error:

> 
> Error in -excluded\_vars : invalid argument to unary operator
> 
> 
> 

the same is true when using `select_()`

Any ideas?