"AP Stylebook says NEVER use the colloquial term pled."

The so-called "AP Stylebook" and thus its editor(s) is frequently INSANE and not to be trusted. I do not trust it any farther than I could throw it, so you should not trust it either.

For example, those editors refuse to concede that a ship or a spaceship is a "she" or a "her". (This is just a case of "political correctness" gone wild.)

Ships and boats have been feminine all the way back to the time of the Ancient Romans, and earlier. (I have studied some Classical Latin, but never any Greek.)

On TV, the Starship USS ENTERPRISE is a "she". You just listen to how Captain James T. Kirk talks about her.

Many important newspapers in the United States do not use the AP Stylebook, either.
You just check with the NEW YORK TIMES and the WASHINGTON POST, which have their own reference books and their own editors. This is probably true for the major newspapers in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, too.
I lived in the area around Washington for years, and I seldom or never had any trouble with the language in the WASHINGTON POST. I am an electrical engineer, too.

Among many other problems, the AP Stylebook cannot get technical English right.

The area called the "Space Coast" of Florida for a time, too, and the daily newspaper there (actually a countywide paper in a large county -- Brevard County), and that newspaper is outstanding in its use of technical English in astronautics and electronics.

The AP Stylebook, in its ignorance, has decided to use an awful work in place of "Web page", despite the fact that "Web" is a shortened form of a proper noun: the World Wide Web. Hence "Web page", just like "British chips", "Canadian bacon", and "START treaty".

Besides writing broken English concerning subjects like the law, education, and medicine, the Associated Press makes one mistake after another on the subjects of engineering and the physical sciences, and on anything concerning military, naval, aeronautical, or aerospace subjects.
D.A.W.

Please look at this news headline carefully

Italy are better than England, says Bonucci
By Mark Meadows of Reuters

MAKE THEM WALK THE PLANK
into shark-infested waters.

They should be made to chant "Pie are square," along the way, too.

Note: Reuters is a British company that got its start in Holland and Germany years ago. How that happened, I do not understand. (The move to England.)
D.A.W.

Why is that many writers, expecially ones who live in the low numbers of longitude, go about writing long words like "further" and "additional" when the short words "more" and "extra" work just fine?

Is it just because they want to appear to be "chrome domes" instead of mere mortals?

For example, "When Eisenhower saw that the Germans were trying to break through at St. Lo, he sent 100 more tanks into the fray."
There is not any need for "a further" or "an additional" in this sentence.

Who has pled guilty to that?

Here is another example -- a peaceful example.
"While they were laying the transatlantic cable, they discovered that they needed 100 more miles of cable to complete the job. Who made an error this large?"
Dale A. Wood

The people should have pled guilty to this.

I had some kind of a problem with the services of some company.
(Actually, this has happened with numerous companies.)

When I made contact with the people there, they set about blaming their problems on their computer. I replied, "No, not whatsoever. That computer is your underling, and whatever it does is YOUR responsibility."

Their response: words to the effect of "Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, ..."

We do have serious problems with people's not taking responsibility for things, and my friends in England have told me that the same problem is widespread there.

We have had serious problems in the courts with "Big Wheels" such as two Governors of Illinois, a congressman from California, and a former senator from North Carolina who have pled "not guilty" to long lists of Federal crimes. The two governors and the congressman are now serving long sentences in prison, and the jury is still deliberating about the former senator.

I believe that those who have pled "not guilty", and then been convicted anyway, should next face the additonal charge of perjury, which is lying to the courts. Somehow, this is not prosecuted in the United States. Why not?

I think that the punishment for serious perjury should include at least seven lashes in the courthouse square at high noon. Then, we should have a good deal less lying in court.

I have read that in Germany, perjury before the courts is not a crime. Defendants are more or less expected to lie in their own defense. This is doubtless the case in many other countries. Shame !!

D.A.W.

Now, we have to put up with mangled English like this:

"Man plunges I - 85 overpass outside Atlanta"

The writer(s) had no idea that "to plunge" like this is an intransive verb.

On the other hand, "to plumb" is transitive, as in these sentence, "I went to the doctor to have my innards plumbed. He found nothing."

DAW

Always go back to the roots. Follow Anglo-Saxon all the way back to German and find the verb "hacken". Look that one up in the right kind of dictionary and find out what it means.

More people who should have pled guilty to the gods of language:

The people who wrote a new TV commercial about how a certain model of car is "bringing the future forward".

Holy Cow. What I want are these:
1. Devices that will make time stand still.
2. Devices that will take me back into the past in order to witness things like:
a) the signing of the Magna Charter, b) Columbus setting foot in the Bahamas,
c) Galileo dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa,
d) Isaac Newton visiting an apple orchard
e) the signing of the Declaration of Independence
f) Lord Cornwallis's assistant handing over his sword to Washington in Yorktown, Virginia,
g) The Wright Brothers making their first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Also, we have way too many people who say "going forward" at the ends of sentences, instead of "in the future". This weird habit can be traced back to one VIP who repeated "going forward" over and over again: Hilary Clinton while she was running for the Democratic nomination for President.

D.A.W.

Concerning: "More likely to be a modern construct to do with Puritan idealists coming to make a fresh, clean start in the New World two thousand years later, in the 17th century."

Sorry, but Pennsylvania was not settled by Puritans. Those came farther north.
Beginning in 1620, the place that became Massachusetts was settled by two groups that had axes to grind with the Church of England. The Puritans thought that the Church could be "purified" and set onto a righteous path. The Separatists were more extreme. They thought that the Church was ruined beyond redemption, and that all they could do was to scrap it and to start over with something new. Neither one of these groups thought much as the Church of England and its lifestyles.

Some time later, there were residents of Massachussetts who were irked by the rule of the Puritans and the Separatists, so they decided to move south. One group of them, lead by Roger Williams, established Rhode Island, and the other group, lead by Thomas Hooker, established Connecticut. Both of these places were created with a lot more religious and political freedom than the people in Massachusetts had, and in these two new colonies, they even established much more liberal churches, including the Unitarian Church and the Universalist Church.

Massachusetts also received another very conservative group of settlers, the Presbyterians -- who were much more conservative than Presbeterians are nowadays. Read about the history of the Presbyterians, and you will probably find that some of their ideas were quite shocking.

As for the Puritans and the Separatists, I believe that those groups vanished into other groups of Protestants a long time ago. Nobody lives like a Puritan anymore, though I think that there are plenty who think like Puritans!

When William Penn established Pennsylvania, he set that colony up as one with widescale religious freedom, and Pennsylvania was settled by a wide variety of different religious groups, including Anabaptists, Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, and a variety of different kinds of Protestants -- and nonbelievers, too. Many Mennonites from Switzerland, southern German, and Austria settled in Pennsylvania, too, and they got the nickname of "Pennsylvania Dutch". However, they weren't Dutch at all, but rather they were "Deutsch" - the German word for "German". German was their primary language for a long time. Many Amish people also settled in Pennsylvania because of the religious freedom there. For a large cluster of Amish settlements, look at the area around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (There is another important town in that area called Intercourse, Pennsylvania -- no kidding. There is also a place with a wild and similar name in Colorado.) .

Maryland (named for the Catholic Queen Mary of England) was established as a refuge for Catholics, but Maryland was actually settled by people of all religions. Maybe the Baltimores had something to do with that.

D.A.W.

The Egyptian connection with that or those Greek words has to do with the old, old practice of Egyptian noblemen marrying their sisters, impregnating them, and having children with them. EGAD! That was something that was all the way back in the time of the Pharoahs.

I worked with an Egyptian engineer, "Mo". back in 1983 - 85. Then along came a pop song by The Bangles called "Walk Like an Egyptian" (with a music video), and I asked Mo if he had ever head of those Mo had not, so I demonstrated how to walk.
Mo exclaimed. "Oh, like back in the time of the Pharoahs!"
"Walk Like an Egyptian!"
D.A.W.

That is a pharmaceutical ad having to do with pain medication.
"Imagine you, feeling no pain." (Ugh!)

Of course, your Irish and Scottish have their ways of feeling no pain:
Irish whiskey and scotch, they are.

I have been told that there is a distilled liquor made and sold in Germany that is more like "white lighting" than anything else that is made in North America.
Feeling no pain, indeed!