Understand. I'm a geezer.
Back in the day, when I was a less than mediocre high school student, I had a teacher who loved words and who taught my friends and me the expression, "twenty four dollar word."
When he'd use a big word that was bandied about only by the intellectual elite or was a highly technical term known only to a small universe of people, he'd stop, repeat the word and say, "Now THAT is a twenty four dollar word." (This was the day when my dad was buying premium gas at the Kayo station for 25.9c a gallon.)
I'm a geezer. What would a twenty four dollar word be worth in today's money?
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On my job, some of my coworkers call me, "the grammar Nazi," because I, jokingly, play around with huge words strung together in sentences that are too long and complex.
When I was reading through HERE WE STAND, I saw many more $24 words than even I wanted to see. But, they were no joke.
HERE WE STAND contains too many $24 words where everyday words would work perfectly well. HWS often links those words together in long, very complex sentences.
The people I live among won't understand it and they won't go to the trouble to make sense out of it. They will simply roll their eyes and ignore it.
I believe that, if we keep HWS at all, we should dissolve this writing committee and begin again with a committee made up of, at the very least, half of its members having no theological education or ministerial credentials preferably loaded with successful and experienced educators.
What we have now will be monumentally ineffective in edifying our body.
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