Studies of language erosion, especially erosion in the advanced stages, are hard to do, and they do not always make for light reading. In evaluating the findings, readers need to maintain a healthy distance between what the evidence actually shows and what they imagine it might show in a hypothetical other world. For bilingual educators, for example, understanding the course of language displacement is a part of our work that we have tended to neglect. Kendal King's investigation of the shift to Spanish in the Saraguro (Quichua-speaking) communities of southern Ecuador marks another advance in this important aspect of the study of bilingualism.