Reply to P. Halloran, printed with his account

Dear Peter,

I have read your recording twice and I am not going to argue with it, because I think you are right, and because a reply which explained why the wording is necessary would be the wording doing the thing you describe.

What I can tell you is what we have and have not done about it. In 1998 we tried a plain-English edition of the procedures and abandoned it, because two houses began treating the plain edition as a summary and the formal one as the real text, which is worse than what we had. In 2007 we made the rule that any paper touching somebody's safety abandons the vocabulary entirely, and that rule holds and I would defend it. Everything else stands as you found it.

You asked, when we spoke, whether we would ever simply stop. I do not think we will, and I would rather say so than hold out a change I cannot deliver. The wording is thirty years of people trying to be exact about things that go wrong when they are described loosely. It has the fault you name. We have kept it anyway. That is a choice and not an accident, and you are entitled to find it a poor one.

Your account is catalogued entire. Nobody will file a note beside it.

The Thursday meal is at seven, as it has been.

— for the stewardship