I’m sorry, my tone was off somewhere. I was not criticizing you at all, but rather the source material. It just surprised me that they characterized it that way.
No worries, I feel like it’s hard to convey tone on the internet. I often personally find it challenging not to come off as confrontational, no matter what my actual intent is.
Reflecting on it a little further, I also think my inconsistent use of “modern” in the prior posts as sometimes a shorthand for both “contemporary” and also “plainly understood” wasn’t doing me any favors in conveying my argument.
Right, understood. I’m saying that’s it’s Modern English as opposed to, say, Middle English. I can (mostly) read Chaucer, for example, but I still have to look stuff up. To me, that’s archaic. I cannot read Old English at all. And difficult, to me, would be, say, James Joyce (over my head, honestly), or Thomas Pynchon (readable, but requires a lot of thought), or say Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco is so much more erudite than I am).
I’m sorry, my tone was off somewhere. I was not criticizing you at all, but rather the source material. It just surprised me that they characterized it that way.
I do apologize for the confusion.
No worries, I feel like it’s hard to convey tone on the internet. I often personally find it challenging not to come off as confrontational, no matter what my actual intent is.
Reflecting on it a little further, I also think my inconsistent use of “modern” in the prior posts as sometimes a shorthand for both “contemporary” and also “plainly understood” wasn’t doing me any favors in conveying my argument.
Right, understood. I’m saying that’s it’s Modern English as opposed to, say, Middle English. I can (mostly) read Chaucer, for example, but I still have to look stuff up. To me, that’s archaic. I cannot read Old English at all. And difficult, to me, would be, say, James Joyce (over my head, honestly), or Thomas Pynchon (readable, but requires a lot of thought), or say Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco is so much more erudite than I am).
Edit: punctuation, ironically