[Book] New book

[LisaFaginDavis]

It's not a question of "ivory tower" vs "popular". It's "accuracy" vs. "inaccuracy." It's misleading to use terminology that is simply wrong. If you don't know the correct term for something, look it up! In any kind of scholarship, regardless of the audience, it is quite possible to both avoid pretension and use accurate descriptive terms. 

In no world could you argue that "paper" is a synonym for "parchment" or "vellum." It isn't just that paper "suggests" a pulp-based, pressed, and dried substrate. It's that paper IS a pulp-based, pressed, and dried substrate. That is a serious error, especially for someone trying to argue that the manuscript is a fake. If he wants to make a serious argument about the material evidence, as he does, this carelessness immediately suggests that we should not be taking that part of his argument seriously. If you need a more generic term that covers both paper and parchment, the right term would be "substrate" or "writing material." 

I don't want to be the kind of person who tosses out an entire book based on what might have been just a careless mistake, but in this case, the error has implications for the rest of his argument and implies that he hasn't really done the reading or understood some fairly important details about the physical reality of the manuscript.

Perhaps "no world" ... except those outside the ivory towers of academia. But, In any case, Williams did not argue they were synonymous. He merely used it as a description. He obviously knows that it isn't pulp-paper or he wouldn't have used the term "calfskin paper".

But the more important point is that it is not relevant to his thesis or even to his competency. For all we know, he made the choice intentionally because he thought it better for his popular auduence. (This was not a scientific paper.) Not a choice I would make, but again -- irrelevant.

There are plenty of reasons to conclude he did not give the whole subject adequate treatment to support his forgery case-- this misuse of the word paper just isn't one if them.
And anyone treating it as one is trying too hard to just find things to criticize. Doing so comes across as petty and undermines the credibility of the critic more than that of Williams.