Ursula K. LeGuin Cannot Read

Apparently she says this about Leiber, in Elfland to Poughkeepsie:

Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny have both written in the comic-heroic vein, but their technique is different: they alternate the two styles. When humor is intended the characters talk colloquial American English, or even slang, and at earnest moments they revert to old formal usages. Readers indifferent to language do not mind this, but for others the strain is too great. I am one of these latter. I am jerked back and forth between Elfland and Poughkeepsie; the characters lose coherence in my mind, and I lose confidence in them.

You illiterate cow.

Leiber did not ever have Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser speak colloquial American English. I'm sure it looks that way to you, but again—illiterate cow. He had them speak colloquial period English, rather than heightened. Yes, it does look a lot like American English—but then, so do the asides in Shakespeare.

Quick, cow, what did Leiber do for a living before he wrote full-time? Oh that's right.

He was a Shakespearean actor.

Indeed, the type of dialect deployed in Lankhmar stories got progressively more be-codpieced and leather-jerkined as Leiber's career progressed; the fourth and fifth books are pretty damned hard going, and the sixth and seventh are virtually unreadable.

Then again I don't know why I'm surprised; LeGuin's "Taoism" comes pretty much exclusively from the "plain sense of" the Dao De Jing, not from the centuries-long tradition of actual Taoists. A literate person might have known that Sola Scriptura is not generally considered a Chinese idea.