Desiderius Erasmus, From Copia Foundations of the Abundant Style BOOK 1 Chapters 1 to 2 and 7 to 9.pdf

Okay, so I'm going to start out by saying that I thought that this piece was kinda funny because Erasmus was calling out excessively verbose rhetoricians who aren't that great at what they do but try to obscure this behind large piles of big words. I also felt drawn to this particular piece because right now I am listening to The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and one of the major themes in this book is that Alchemy is a subject that is so simple that all of its tenants and knowledge can be written in three lines on the surface of an emerald but people who came later needlessly complicated the subject and made it so mysterious that only a few people could understand. I thought that this work by Erasmus paralleled this sentiment almost exactly and I strongly agree with his arguments. It makes me wonder what other subjects have been so needlessly complicated by generations of people studying and trying to understand them (probably most have). I also think that sometimes people miss the point of trying to understand these subjects, especially teachers. I've had a lot of teachers in the past who didn't really have an interest in helping people understand their subject, they just wanted to boast of their intelligence and how much more they know than the students. I didn't learn very much from these people.