The argument for rewriting the book Alcoholics Anonymous rests on two bases, firstly that readers do not understand it and secondly that such a failure in comprehension can be remedied only by changing the book.
Is the book incomprehensible?
We have seen the truth demonstrated again and again: “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.’’ Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever.
There is nothing obscure about this.
Most obscure phrases or references have a sense that is easily retrievable from the context.
E.g.:
I’ve prayed to God on hangover mornings and sworn that I’d never touch another drop but by nine o’clock I’d be boiled as an owl.
You do not have to be familiar with the phrase boiled as an owl to discern that it means drunk.
A more genuinely obscure reference is this one:
Abruptly in October 1929 hell broke loose on the New York stock exchange. After one of those days of inferno, I wobbled from a hotel bar to a brokerage office. It was eight o’clock—five hours after the market closed. The ticker still clattered. I was staring at an inch of the tape which bore the inscription XYZ-32. It had been 52 that morning. I was finished and so were many friends.
Even in this case, it is clear, even if one does not know precisely what a ticker is, that it is an information system that allows the user to identify their financial position. In any case, the main point of the paragraph is clear: he is finished.
Whilst the reader may hold different values than the writers (e.g. may object to the fact that, in the 1930s, the man was often seen as the head of the house) and refuses to read anything written by people of different cultures or different ages, that's not a question of comprehension: the reader has perfectly well understood the material. They just don't like it, and that's their prerogative.
In short, although there are obscure words, phrases, and references, the text is not incomprehensible.
To the extent that it is indeed incomprehensible, is the only solution rewriting?
The argument usually runs like this: the newcomer alcoholic does not understand the book, and unless it is rewritten for them, they will not be able to benefit from its contents.
This falls down on a number of points:
Non-comprehending readers struggle not just with the obscure words, phrases and references but with the plain passages, too
Anyone who has sponsored many people will discover that most readers cannot make head or tail of the book, but that this has little or nothing to do with understanding the propositional content on its pages: the problem is that the mind is so scrambled that they cannot take any information in, whatsoever, unless a sponsor spoon-feeds it.
A good example is this instruction I give people when they ask if they can speak to me on the phone: Call.
That is clear and unambiguous. It means call. Yet most people, on receiving this instruction, go on to ask permission once again to call or to ask when they can call. This is true not just of newcomers.
I've often experienced the plainest instructions given to sponsees or passages in the Big Book tortured into quite different senses than those intended, by the fevered mind of the untreated alcoholic.
Writing a dumbed-down version of the Big Book will not solve this problem. Recovery solves this problem. And that means, until they recover, the sponsor will need to spoon-feed most sponsees.
Readers who struggle with obscure words, phrases, and references have plenty of resources available to them
Let's take the boiled as an owl example. Googling it produces this, as the first hit: '(orig. US) very drunk'. This takes two seconds. Any alcoholic who is unwilling to take two seconds to understand something is severely lacking in will and intention. If two seconds of effort is too much, the effort of reading a whole book will be beyond them.
And yet are alcoholics lacking in will, resourcefulness, perseverance, and ingenuity? Obviously not: consider how these resources must be deployed to enable alcoholic drinking over the years.
If the reader stumbles over such terms and does not resolve them, it is not because they cannot: it is because they are not interested in resolving them. The fundamental lack of interest and will that this betrays will in any case scupper the process, regardless of the removal of such minor linguistic impediments.
In the contemporary world, people are able to process different varieties of English
Most people travel and encounter different varieties of English: dialect, idiolect, accent, and register. These present significant superficial difficulties in comprehension but do not prevent communication to those who are willing and interested in communicating.
Those who do not travel will likely watch a lot of television. Many British people were avid viewers of the US American series The Wire, which was replete with impenetrable Baltimore drug-dealer and police dialect. The viewers got used to this and figured out what the characters were saying. The same goes for American viewers watching Downton Abbey, with terminology, notions, and modes of expression peculiar to Edwardian English.
And how many science fiction films and series dump the viewer into worlds with entirely alien frames of reference, terminology, and concepts? People lap this up, and it turns out people are far more capable of acclimatising themselves to other varieties of English, almost instantaneously so.
Finally, how many alcoholics learned to navigate the lingo of local drug dealers, a million miles away from the socioeconomic backgrounds they grew up in? Did they ask the drug dealers to express themselves in standard English, or else they weren't going to buy their drugs? No, they adapted.
Don't believe excuses
In short, there is no major problem with the language in the Big Book, and, to the extent that there are difficulties, these can be resolved swiftly by the willing and overlooked by anyone. If the Big Book is not being read, it is not because of the language. It is because it challenges the reader to let go of their old ideas and adopt new ones. No rewriting will fix this.