Right now I'm reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries. They're very interesting and on the whole well written – as a book it doesn't qualify for this thread at all – but there are one or two places where I get the feeling his editor has asked him to dumb down 'hard words'. Or maybe he's just felt the need to explain them and it's nothing to do with the editor. Here's an example:
In a contemporary interview, ... Mrs Marcos is quoted as wishing that her epitaph, what she wants written on her tombstone, should not be her name but the words here lies love.
If you feel there's really a need to explain 'epitaph' then why use it? Why not just say 'what she wants written on her tombstone'? Come to that, if someone really doesn't know the word 'epitaph' and can't even look it up in a dictionary, they probably won't understand a lot of other things in the book. So perhaps there's some other explanation, but whatever it is, it's clunky.
There's also a chortle-tastic typo when he mentions an Istanbul hotel that 'was once, in the days of the Orient Express, the height of elegance. Hemingway, Garbo, Hitchcock and King Edward III stayed here.'