September 14, 2025

 I overheard a conversation today on a topic about which I disagree. I was tempted to insinuate myself into the discussion so that I could make my opinion known. But, then I realized that not every one wants to know my thoughts on certain subjects, so I did something out of character and kept my mouth that.

I did make comments to the people I was with about the same subject. It concerned a book that was recently written on a subject that is familiar to me. The original book was written in 1939 and this recent book was the Plain language version of that book. It's true that the language used in the old book was often outdated and not in common usage these days, and the language in the new book used terms that most everyone these days understands. I concede that point. However, the message in the new book is a watered down version of the message in the original book.

Back in the day, I used the dictionary a lot to look up words that I was unfamiliar with. The theory is that if you read a sentence and there is a word in that sentence that you do not understand, you might not understand the sentence. If you do not understand the sentence, you might not understand the paragraph. Nowadays, you can just google words like that, but we didn't have Google back then.

My thoughts are you don't need a plain language version of a book. You just need the original book and either a dictionary or a cell phone. Maybe it's because I'm from a different time zone.