Your citation refers to the register keyword and trigraphs, among other language features -- the author seems to have forgotten his own point, among a number of other inconsistencies and contradictions, and at times seems to go out of his way to come across as a jerk, e.g., "This is what fifteen years of standards work on an eight-letter keyword looks like".

People love to rag on the standards committee. I was on X3J11, the C Language Standards Committee, in 1989 ... in fact, due to alphabetical order I was the first person on the planet to vote to approve the C language standard -- the one that first standardized register and trigraphs. Standards work is hard and everyone hates you for it.

The C Committee is fine and doing great work! The C++ Committee could actually learn a thing or two from how things are done on the C side.