ABSTRACT
I should reiterate that the difficulties exist only for learners and others who don’t understand what people using these common mathematical terms are talking about. For anyone familiar with the mathematics, who has no trouble with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, the casual use of mathematical language appears obvious. Such people often wonder why beginners have so much trouble. This is a difficulty for an author in writing about such matters. Readers long familiar with plus, minus, and all the other technical words may find it difficult to see why the ambiguities I talk about create any kind of problem. Surely their meanings are obvious. I can only suggest that such readers try to imagine the problems they would have trying to understand “simple explanations” of recondite matters they know little about, a learned discussion of quantum physics, perhaps, or microbiology, or postmodernism. There they would encounter a blank wall.
