In article ,
ost (Chris Mark) wrote:

From: Cub Driver look

Mr. West refers to grenades as "hand
bombs", and it's not because he doesn't know better. He was a platoon
leader in Vietnam. I assume he decided to make things easier for the
modern reader.

Or his editor did. On a book I am working on in every instance where I wrote
"radial" engine, some genius changed it to "circular."

Maybe your editor is using the same software package that some major
newspapers have been using that does suggests word substitutions in some
cases, ostensibly to improve readability (or something). Unfortunately,
one example of its behavior was to suggest replacing every occurance of
the word "black" with "African-American".

Or so the story goes.