CRITICS WANTED

I sincerely appreciate respondents to an article I have written for The E-Sylum. Rather than bristle at such criticism I learn a different viewpoint to one of my statements. One of thefeatures of The E-Sylum is that it encourages such dialogue. We advance numismatic knowledge by exposure to the best thinking in the field and who better than E-Sylum readers for anactive exchange of ideas and facts.

This means you are invited to think about not only my articles but all others in The E-Sylum, then write your comments for Wayne Homren to include in the next issue. It is like theinvitation for comments at the end of most every article on the internet. The difference is that it is edited by Wayne, unlike those other responses. (And Wayne is good, one of the best, an MS-70 inthe field of numismatic editors.)

Thus I would like to give a shout-out "Thank You" to all my critics, including the most recent: John Lupia, Ken Spindler, Arthur Shippee, John Phipps, and dozens and dozens of others.

In the case of my Encyclopedia of Coin and Medal Technology entries -- run as Vocabulary Words in The E-Sylum - I often change the content based on what some critic has stated.

Before I printed the draft of that Encyclopedia I submitted sections of the text to fellow members of the Rittenhouse Society for a peer review. I rewrote hundreds of entries from theirsuggestions. The intent of all is full accuracy of technical data.

Having said that I would like to respond to a recent comment to my vocabulary word "center dot." The reader said:

Here's why I disagree with that statement: If each writer or cataloger used a different term from others we have a numismatic Tower of Bable. Far better to have a form or definition accepted byall, the standard everyone will use and understand.

With this invitation in mind, please comment on something I have written.

To read the complete article, see:
ALTERNATE TERMS FOR 'CENTER DOT' (http://www.coinbooks.org/v20/esylum_v20n43a08.html)