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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. It covers topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words (homonyms and synonyms), and the use of foreign terms.
This book is intended for general; students and teachers of English; anyone wanting guidance on the correct use of English.
This book is intended for general; students and teachers of English; anyone wanting guidance on the correct use of English.
752 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
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About the author
Henry Watson Fowler
142 books21 followersHenry Watson Fowler (10 March 1858 – 26 December 1933) was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English language. He is notable for both A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and was described by The Times as "a lexicographical genius".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
August 23, 2007
the first edition of this was published in 1926. written by a genius named Henry Fowler, it is a legendary masterpiece of wit, erudition, and inscrutable insight into how to write well. it has everything - commonly confused pairs, spellings, plurals, and ultranittygritty grammar (EIGHT PAGES on the word "that"). the entries are like little essays, pithy and hilarious, and soooooo old school.
the first ed is great, but suffers a bit as a tool for writing today, so after much humming and hawing, i bought the SECOND edition. the 2nd ed was published in 1965, revised by a guy named gowers. everything he changed, he spoiled, but times have changed and the update was necessary. WARNING: there is now a third (or "NEW") edition out. it is horrible. hardly a whiff of the wry humor is left. it's just another usage brick. get the first edition if you want a treasure. get the 2nd ed if you want a wonderful tool. get the third if you want a lifeless piece of crap.
the first ed is great, but suffers a bit as a tool for writing today, so after much humming and hawing, i bought the SECOND edition. the 2nd ed was published in 1965, revised by a guy named gowers. everything he changed, he spoiled, but times have changed and the update was necessary. WARNING: there is now a third (or "NEW") edition out. it is horrible. hardly a whiff of the wry humor is left. it's just another usage brick. get the first edition if you want a treasure. get the 2nd ed if you want a wonderful tool. get the third if you want a lifeless piece of crap.
November 23, 2007
Although I do not find this book truly useful, I do find it amusing.
Here is the part about French words:
Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth -- greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. That is the guiding principle alike in the using and in the pronouncing of French words in English writing and talk. To use French words that your reader or hearer does not understand, to pronounce them as if you were one of the select few to whom French is second nature when he is not one of those few (and it is ten thousand to one that neither you nor he will be), is inconsiderate and rude.
Here is the part about French words:
Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth -- greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. That is the guiding principle alike in the using and in the pronouncing of French words in English writing and talk. To use French words that your reader or hearer does not understand, to pronounce them as if you were one of the select few to whom French is second nature when he is not one of those few (and it is ten thousand to one that neither you nor he will be), is inconsiderate and rude.
September 13, 2010
4.0 stars. This is on the short list of the best reference books around. It is not accurate to say that I have "read" this entire book but I have been using it fairly extensively since I acquired it in 1991 as part of an 8 volume leather bound set from Easton Press called the "Complete Oxford Reference Set." I have found it to be an excellent reference tool that is both easy to use and comprehensive.
November 3, 2014
Fowler's "Modern English Usage" is one of those books that really has no business existing: a reference guide that's fun to read. You could spend hours flipping from entry to entry -- especially since many of the entries make reference to others -- discovering all the mistakes you've been making in your writing over the years. Because H.W. Fowler was incredibly opinionated (check out his stance, for example, on the use of "preface" vs. "foreword"), the book's unique abbreviations take some getting used to, and the written language has changed quite a bit since "Modern English Usage" was first published, this book is more of an enjoyable read than a go-to writing guide. Perhaps the modern revisions (which I'm unfamiliar with -- I was lucky enough to find an edition from the '20s) are more functional, but they couldn't possibly be any more fun.
October 30, 2017
This book has a few gems to educate the reader on the history of usage and to correct some common misunderstandings and mistakes. But these are hidden in a mass of detail. The book is plagued with the following defects: (1) too often Fowler takes forever, if ever, to make his point and, even then, his point is not frequently clear; (2)on the issue of clarity, Fowler lapses into his own considerable jargon so that, for example, "'of' is here not partitive but appositional" and it is even now more understandable why students hate English; (3) he occasionally goes off on what seems to be his own exercise in rank (e.g., simple people use the saying "As the saying goes," as if there is something inherently wrong here; and (4) no where does he discuss how his insistence on his version of correct usage matches up with the evolution of usage, why idiomatic use is not misuse, and just why his perspective on particular usage is something more than his subjective preference.
In reading some of the reviews of this book, it is understandable why many do appreciate what Fowler has done. To read through 725 pages of dictionary style treatment on usage generally would require that level of appreciation. But as a general guide for those not so enthused with all this detail, Fowler seems dated (recent, not modern, English), and overly obsessive and obscure. He would go nuts today's computer age. If two thirds of his book were eliminated, it would be a valuable reference guide, but then it wouldn't be Fowler either.
In reading some of the reviews of this book, it is understandable why many do appreciate what Fowler has done. To read through 725 pages of dictionary style treatment on usage generally would require that level of appreciation. But as a general guide for those not so enthused with all this detail, Fowler seems dated (recent, not modern, English), and overly obsessive and obscure. He would go nuts today's computer age. If two thirds of his book were eliminated, it would be a valuable reference guide, but then it wouldn't be Fowler either.
August 11, 2007
Fowler is truly the most english of englishmen. This is a righteously indignant, uptight, catty look at how language should and shouldn't be used. While the second edition was mildly updated in 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers, it remains in essence a turn of the century work. Just plain fun to read.
April 10, 2018
Fowler’s advice, his examples, and inherent relevance show some wear, but nothing that the author’s sense of humour doesn’t amply recompense. I speak of this 1968 edition. The few more flavourful entries that I was able to search for in a 1996 edition were either non-existent or effectively bowdlerised. What’s left nowadays is the bland and spartan, but most pragmatic, dictionary-speak.
I understand why—political correctness and modernisation march rightly on—though I think the earlier editions can still be enjoyed, if not as go-to guides, then as historical documents. Quirky and witty ones at that. Although, I warn you: quirk and wit have this charismatic presence that often wins out over straight-laced teachings.
Two quotes from Sir Ernest’s Preface to the Revise Edition set the tone for the Dictionary.
The first quote conveys the intention of the entries and exemplifies (wittingly?) the linguistic complexities to come.
Once you've parsed that, reading Fowler’s is all downhill. (If omit needless words was an autological phrase due to its brevity, this is an autological sentence due to its complexity.)
The second quote comes after an account of Fowler’s life and nails the idiosyncratic nature of his writing. It concerns angels.
In that one intransitive past participle, I now see fluttering wings, feathers of gold, and the fight against gravity. An inimitable combination lost to anyone reading later editions.
Fowler’s commentary enlivens explanations, making them more memorable, and in some cases, overshadowing them. For example, under object-shuffling—which you may or may not feel bothered by—there's the following justification:
I agree, and I’m glad that he recognised the necessity for (humane) naming conventions. What’s more, I think most phenomena that are common—so not just mistakes, and also not just within linguistics—should be labelled whenever possible as a way of enriching a person’s mental ecosystem. You can only think about things clearly, or at all, once you can grasp them between tongue and tooth.
Under false scent, Fowler dispenses basic advice that most of the internet would be well advised to remember.
Finally, here are a few brief (incomplete) excerpts from the Dictionary itself.
Do you know any sufferers?
A basic stylistic point.
Cliché is so cliché. Let us bring in a fresher moniker.
You only think of it when you get into a to-to and the accenting isn’t right (or it looks weird on the page).
Yikes!
Why reading your writing aloud matters.
Sneaky!
Fowler goes on to say, however, that you can inspire courage in a person, or inspire a person with courage. The reason why object-shuffling doesn't work comes from Latin, but still, it’s reassuring to know there is a reason.
Works with more than one jump too. Frying pan, fire, cat’s dinner. There’s no coming back from cat’s dinner—instead try to gain higher ground, a five-millimetre thick Tupperware container perhaps, cat-proof and airtight. Airtight, grammatically, I mean, of course. We're speaking of linguistic moggies.
Most hazardous when parenthetical interjections float mid-stream (from experience).
The bane of infinite (nested) relative clauses.
Unlike in I shut and locked him in, in which the him isn’t walled-up (or locked in, if you want to be droll).
The eccentricities of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style—chiefly Strunk’s unabashed grammatical boldness tempered by White’s hard-nosed insistence on (sensible) rules—complement the humorous idiosyncrasies of Fowler's. Both books were first published in the 1920s; both were first revised about forty years later. Fowler’s runs to seven hundred pages and is meant as much as a style, grammar, and language guide, as a place to look up spelling or pronunciation of certain words. However, were you to strip away the word entries and leave only the horses, the frying pans, and the battered ornaments, I believe you’d get a short booklet, not unlike Strunk & White’s stylistic guide. Has no one attempted such an exercise?
Perhaps it's down to controversy.
The most controversial aspect White had to edit out of Strunk’s book to make it politically vanilla was advocating masculine pronouns as the generic norm. From the second edition of Fowler’s the editors of modernity have had to excise much more.
To illustrate the point:
Fowler writes that unjustified word order inversions are like stiletto heels—ugly things resorted to in the false belief that artificiality is more beautiful than nature. The 1998 edition has no room for such colourful statements (after all we take our colour as spray-on tan, reality shows, and the news). Like the angels of the intransitive past participle, fallen then forcibly forgotten, word order inversions were required to remove their memorable stiletto heels.
What a shame.
I understand why—political correctness and modernisation march rightly on—though I think the earlier editions can still be enjoyed, if not as go-to guides, then as historical documents. Quirky and witty ones at that. Although, I warn you: quirk and wit have this charismatic presence that often wins out over straight-laced teachings.
Two quotes from Sir Ernest’s Preface to the Revise Edition set the tone for the Dictionary.
The first quote conveys the intention of the entries and exemplifies (wittingly?) the linguistic complexities to come.
There are some passages that only yield [the desired sense] after what the reader may think an excessive amount of scrutiny—passages demanding hardly less concentration than one of the more obscure sections of a Finance Act, and for the same reason: the determination of the writer to make sure that, when the reader eventually gropes his way to a meaning, it shall be, beyond all possible doubt, the meaning intended by the writer.
Once you've parsed that, reading Fowler’s is all downhill. (If omit needless words was an autological phrase due to its brevity, this is an autological sentence due to its complexity.)
The second quote comes after an account of Fowler’s life and nails the idiosyncratic nature of his writing. It concerns angels.
Such was the man whose idiosyncrasy so strongly colours his book. The whimsicality that was his armour in adversity enlivens it in unexpected places; thus by way of illustrating the difficulty there may be in identifying a phenomenon he calls ‘the intransitive past participle’, he observes that ‘an angel dropped form heaven’ has possibly been passive, but more likely active, in the descent.
In that one intransitive past participle, I now see fluttering wings, feathers of gold, and the fight against gravity. An inimitable combination lost to anyone reading later editions.
Fowler’s commentary enlivens explanations, making them more memorable, and in some cases, overshadowing them. For example, under object-shuffling—which you may or may not feel bothered by—there's the following justification:
The conferring of a name on a type of mistake, making it recognizable [sic] and avoidable, is worth while [sic] if the mistake is common.
I agree, and I’m glad that he recognised the necessity for (humane) naming conventions. What’s more, I think most phenomena that are common—so not just mistakes, and also not just within linguistics—should be labelled whenever possible as a way of enriching a person’s mental ecosystem. You can only think about things clearly, or at all, once you can grasp them between tongue and tooth.
Under false scent, Fowler dispenses basic advice that most of the internet would be well advised to remember.
The possibilities of false scent are too miscellaneous to be exhaustively tabulated; the image of the reader with the open mind, ready to seize every chance for going wrong, should be always present to the inexperienced writer.
Finally, here are a few brief (incomplete) excerpts from the Dictionary itself.
abstractitis. Addiction to abstract words.
Do you know any sufferers?
avoidance of the obvious. In choice of words the obvious is better than its obvious avoidance.
A basic stylistic point.
battered ornaments. An introduction to other articles on words and phrases best avoided for their triteness.
Cliché is so cliché. Let us bring in a fresher moniker.
cannibalism. For instance the swallowing of a to by another to in ‘Doubt as to whom he was referring’.
You only think of it when you get into a to-to and the accenting isn’t right (or it looks weird on the page).
false scent. Misleading the reader.
Nor has the writer even the satisfaction of calling his reader a fool for misunderstanding him, since he seldom hears of it; it is the reader who calls the writer a fool for not being able to express himself.
Yikes!
jingles, or the unintended repetition of the same word or similar sounds.
[One example is:] Hardworking folk should participate in the pleasures of leisure in goodly measure.
Why reading your writing aloud matters.
legerdemain. Using a word twice without noticing that the sense required the second time is different from that of the first.
Sneaky!
object-shuffling. Such as ‘Instil people with hope’ for ‘instil hope into people’.
Fowler goes on to say, however, that you can inspire courage in a person, or inspire a person with courage. The reason why object-shuffling doesn't work comes from Latin, but still, it’s reassuring to know there is a reason.
out of the frying pan. Examples of a writer’s being faulty in one way because he has tried to avoid being faulty in another.
Works with more than one jump too. Frying pan, fire, cat’s dinner. There’s no coming back from cat’s dinner—instead try to gain higher ground, a five-millimetre thick Tupperware container perhaps, cat-proof and airtight. Airtight, grammatically, I mean, of course. We're speaking of linguistic moggies.
swapping horses while crossing the stream, a notoriously hazardous operation, is paralleled in speech by changing a word’s sense in the middle of a sentence, by vacillating between two constructions either of which might follow a word legitimately enough …
Most hazardous when parenthetical interjections float mid-stream (from experience).
trailers. Specimens of sentences that keep on disappointing the reader’s hope of coming to an end.
The bane of infinite (nested) relative clauses.
walled-up object. Such as him in ‘I scolded and sent him to bed.’
Unlike in I shut and locked him in, in which the him isn’t walled-up (or locked in, if you want to be droll).
The eccentricities of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style—chiefly Strunk’s unabashed grammatical boldness tempered by White’s hard-nosed insistence on (sensible) rules—complement the humorous idiosyncrasies of Fowler's. Both books were first published in the 1920s; both were first revised about forty years later. Fowler’s runs to seven hundred pages and is meant as much as a style, grammar, and language guide, as a place to look up spelling or pronunciation of certain words. However, were you to strip away the word entries and leave only the horses, the frying pans, and the battered ornaments, I believe you’d get a short booklet, not unlike Strunk & White’s stylistic guide. Has no one attempted such an exercise?
Perhaps it's down to controversy.
The most controversial aspect White had to edit out of Strunk’s book to make it politically vanilla was advocating masculine pronouns as the generic norm. From the second edition of Fowler’s the editors of modernity have had to excise much more.
To illustrate the point:
Fowler writes that unjustified word order inversions are like stiletto heels—ugly things resorted to in the false belief that artificiality is more beautiful than nature. The 1998 edition has no room for such colourful statements (after all we take our colour as spray-on tan, reality shows, and the news). Like the angels of the intransitive past participle, fallen then forcibly forgotten, word order inversions were required to remove their memorable stiletto heels.
What a shame.
July 27, 2019
The standard to which all the others are compared
It is somewhat amazing that this book, first published in 1926, is still in print. The language has changed quite a bit since then; thousands of words have been added, hundreds have gone obsolete, and hundreds more have had their meanings shaded; and of course many of Fowler's pronouncements are now merely echoes of battles long lost or won. Not only that, but two newer editions of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage have been published, the excellent second edition edited by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965 (now ironically out of print while the original finds yet another printing), and the not so entirely well-received (but underrated in my opinion) third edition, edited and revised by R.W. Burchfield in 1996.
How to account for this phenomenon? Part of it is because Fowler's reputation only grew after his death as several generations of writers sang his praises and adhered to, or sometimes fussed about, his many dicta on usage questions both great and small. And as the years went by, and as the pages of his masterpiece gave way to wine stains and silverfish or the few remaining copies disappeared from libraries, he himself became a legend. Not everything he wrote is considered correct today, nor was it then. And sometimes the succinct yet magisterial little essays he wrote were followed by other little essays that were all but impenetrable, obtuse and somewhat overbearing. No matter. The good greatly outweighed the occasional misjudgment, and the education he afforded us remains.
Another part of the story is that there is something very properly English and wonderfully nostalgic about the man himself. He was a bit of a character who lied about his age and joined the army when he was 56-years-old to fight the Germans in the Great War (only to faint on the parade grounds), a man who earlier gave up a teaching career because he did not feel it was his responsibility to prepare a student for the seminary. More than anything, though, the fact that this book is still in demand is a testament to the high regard and affection felt by the literate public toward Fowler himself.
What Fowler knew and preached was that before we could presume to be literary artists or journalists or even authors of readable letters we must of necessity, if we are to be effective, be craftsmen. Central to his purpose was the belief that the right word in its proper place and context constituted the backbone and much of the muscle and sinew of forthright and effective writing. That belief along with Fowler's celebrated passion for the concise and the correct, and his intolerance of ignorance and humbug, coupled with his sometimes incomparable expression, long ago won him the undying respect and admiration of careful writers of the English language the world over.
But this is something of a problem. Since Fowler last set pen to page some seventy-one years ago (he died in 1933), the English language has changed and grown enormously. What was correct and effective then, as well as what was ineffective, offensively brash or downright ugly has in some cases become acceptable and even felicitous. So, like it or not, Fowler had to be updated, and of course there was no shortage of lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, journalists and others looking to do the job. Furthermore, the "Great Divide" between American English and British English needed to be explained, recorded, and codified. Some of the people who have joined in this enterprise over the years have been H. L. Mencken, Jens Jespersen, Margaret Nicholson, Dwight MacDonald, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, and more recently, Bryan A. Garner and R.W. Burchfield, and many others. I think all of them, if they looked over their shoulder would see upon the wall an especially sober portrait of Fowler passing silent judgment upon their protracted labors. Certainly on their desks would be this book.
So I recommend that you buy that very impressive book by Garner (Garner's Modern American Usage), especially if you are an American, or splurge for a copy of that underrated third edition edited by Burchfield, and that you consult them as well as this venerable authority. As you use the books you may compare and contrast and get a nice feel for where the language has been and where it is headed.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
It is somewhat amazing that this book, first published in 1926, is still in print. The language has changed quite a bit since then; thousands of words have been added, hundreds have gone obsolete, and hundreds more have had their meanings shaded; and of course many of Fowler's pronouncements are now merely echoes of battles long lost or won. Not only that, but two newer editions of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage have been published, the excellent second edition edited by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965 (now ironically out of print while the original finds yet another printing), and the not so entirely well-received (but underrated in my opinion) third edition, edited and revised by R.W. Burchfield in 1996.
How to account for this phenomenon? Part of it is because Fowler's reputation only grew after his death as several generations of writers sang his praises and adhered to, or sometimes fussed about, his many dicta on usage questions both great and small. And as the years went by, and as the pages of his masterpiece gave way to wine stains and silverfish or the few remaining copies disappeared from libraries, he himself became a legend. Not everything he wrote is considered correct today, nor was it then. And sometimes the succinct yet magisterial little essays he wrote were followed by other little essays that were all but impenetrable, obtuse and somewhat overbearing. No matter. The good greatly outweighed the occasional misjudgment, and the education he afforded us remains.
Another part of the story is that there is something very properly English and wonderfully nostalgic about the man himself. He was a bit of a character who lied about his age and joined the army when he was 56-years-old to fight the Germans in the Great War (only to faint on the parade grounds), a man who earlier gave up a teaching career because he did not feel it was his responsibility to prepare a student for the seminary. More than anything, though, the fact that this book is still in demand is a testament to the high regard and affection felt by the literate public toward Fowler himself.
What Fowler knew and preached was that before we could presume to be literary artists or journalists or even authors of readable letters we must of necessity, if we are to be effective, be craftsmen. Central to his purpose was the belief that the right word in its proper place and context constituted the backbone and much of the muscle and sinew of forthright and effective writing. That belief along with Fowler's celebrated passion for the concise and the correct, and his intolerance of ignorance and humbug, coupled with his sometimes incomparable expression, long ago won him the undying respect and admiration of careful writers of the English language the world over.
But this is something of a problem. Since Fowler last set pen to page some seventy-one years ago (he died in 1933), the English language has changed and grown enormously. What was correct and effective then, as well as what was ineffective, offensively brash or downright ugly has in some cases become acceptable and even felicitous. So, like it or not, Fowler had to be updated, and of course there was no shortage of lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, journalists and others looking to do the job. Furthermore, the "Great Divide" between American English and British English needed to be explained, recorded, and codified. Some of the people who have joined in this enterprise over the years have been H. L. Mencken, Jens Jespersen, Margaret Nicholson, Dwight MacDonald, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, and more recently, Bryan A. Garner and R.W. Burchfield, and many others. I think all of them, if they looked over their shoulder would see upon the wall an especially sober portrait of Fowler passing silent judgment upon their protracted labors. Certainly on their desks would be this book.
So I recommend that you buy that very impressive book by Garner (Garner's Modern American Usage), especially if you are an American, or splurge for a copy of that underrated third edition edited by Burchfield, and that you consult them as well as this venerable authority. As you use the books you may compare and contrast and get a nice feel for where the language has been and where it is headed.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
June 20, 2012
I have to agree with the more erudite reviews already posted: in some ways, this is a 5-star work. In others, it's a write-off.
As a writer myself, I find Fowler to be one of the pre-eminent reference texts. He covers a vast range of words and phrases - from the regularly misused to archaisms which, when they are used, need clarifying - with a wit that often borders on scathing. It's great fun to be searching for a simple definition or clarification, and end up having a good giggle at the same time. Because the book was written in the 'glory days' of the early 20th century, Fowler takes time to explain his stance, without resorting to dumbing down the information.
On the other hand, as other commentators have noted, one of the joys of the English language is its evolution. I believe that the history of a word is vitally important, that being more than simply competent in your language is a great gift, and thus am I against these dimwitted arguments to simplify our spelling, or limit our general vocabulary in academic institutions or the media. However, language is in a state of constant flux, and to argue that there is only ever one correct usage of a word or term is ridiculous. Something that was correct in 1926 for Fowler may be ludicrous for us in 2012, and may have been equally so for Elizabeth I, or Samuel Johnson, or Jane Austen. Beyond this, Fowler seems to be confused about the distinction between formal and informal language use. Is idomatic English to be held to the same standards as formal documents? Isn't one of the joys of being proficient in your language, that you can stretch the boundaries of meaning and definition - both in a parodic, conversational manner, and in a serious way? As with anyone who grows passionate about a subject that is steeped in tradition, I always feel torn in these situations: to revere Fowler for his wit, intelligence, and passion? Or bemoan him for being a pedant?
The question lingers...
As a writer myself, I find Fowler to be one of the pre-eminent reference texts. He covers a vast range of words and phrases - from the regularly misused to archaisms which, when they are used, need clarifying - with a wit that often borders on scathing. It's great fun to be searching for a simple definition or clarification, and end up having a good giggle at the same time. Because the book was written in the 'glory days' of the early 20th century, Fowler takes time to explain his stance, without resorting to dumbing down the information.
On the other hand, as other commentators have noted, one of the joys of the English language is its evolution. I believe that the history of a word is vitally important, that being more than simply competent in your language is a great gift, and thus am I against these dimwitted arguments to simplify our spelling, or limit our general vocabulary in academic institutions or the media. However, language is in a state of constant flux, and to argue that there is only ever one correct usage of a word or term is ridiculous. Something that was correct in 1926 for Fowler may be ludicrous for us in 2012, and may have been equally so for Elizabeth I, or Samuel Johnson, or Jane Austen. Beyond this, Fowler seems to be confused about the distinction between formal and informal language use. Is idomatic English to be held to the same standards as formal documents? Isn't one of the joys of being proficient in your language, that you can stretch the boundaries of meaning and definition - both in a parodic, conversational manner, and in a serious way? As with anyone who grows passionate about a subject that is steeped in tradition, I always feel torn in these situations: to revere Fowler for his wit, intelligence, and passion? Or bemoan him for being a pedant?
The question lingers...
October 25, 2007
The 1926 edition was riveting, the sort of prose that seduces your snarky mind and infects your dreams. Logical, romantic, hilarious: the firmest virtues.
This thick modern update is a bag of wind, a pail of Sominex. Consult it if you need to, but don't say I didn't warn you if the resulting narcolepsy puts you off your game.
This thick modern update is a bag of wind, a pail of Sominex. Consult it if you need to, but don't say I didn't warn you if the resulting narcolepsy puts you off your game.
November 24, 2013
A dangerous book to consult. Many, many times I have picked it up to check something specific, only to find out, an instant later, that 30 minutes have passed, and I am still reading. James Patterson should write such riveting prose.
March 29, 2018
Years ago, I fell in love with Fowler's righteous wrath, his irony, his impeccable use of Oxford comma. Whenever I feel down, I open this book and read a random entry. Should you read it? Nah. Should you own it and peruse it every now and then? Absolutely! Spoilers below.
His examples and turns of phrase are brilliant. Ever thought how you'd mix "touch pitch" and "defile" in the same sentence? There you go:
His fine distinctions give me a tingly sense of righteousness. I feel validated and vindicated:
That righteous rage? Just search for the simple words:
Lots of examples follow in this entry for "proposition". Some, like the first one below, seem outrageous to me as a non-native speaker:
And just when you thought he was over:
Had he lived to read facebook or tumblr posts, Fowler would have been miserable. And an extremely popular meme maker, mixing sports metaphors and Tennyson, newspaper quotes and Shakespeare, memory and desire.
His examples and turns of phrase are brilliant. Ever thought how you'd mix "touch pitch" and "defile" in the same sentence? There you go:
superiority. Much misplaced ingenuity in finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled. Among them are: To use an expressive colloquialism—in the vernacular phrase—if the word may be permitted—so to speak—in homely phrase—not to put too fine a point upon it—if the word be not too vulgar—as they say—to call a spade a spade—not to mince matters—in the jargon of today—or the use of depreciatory inverted commas. Such writers should make up their minds whether their reputation or their style is such as to allow of their dismounting from the high horse now and again without compromising themselves. If they can do that, at all, they can dispense with apologies: if the apology is needed, the thing apologized for would be better away. A grievance once redressed ceases to be an electoral asset (if we may use a piece of terminology which we confess we dislike). / Turgenev had so quick an eye: he is the master of the vignette—a tiresome word, but it still has to serve. [...] In short, some writers use a slang phrase because it suits them, and box the ears of people in general because it is slang; a refinement on the institution of whipping-boys, by which they not only have the boy, but do the whipping.
His fine distinctions give me a tingly sense of righteousness. I feel validated and vindicated:
humanist. The word is apt to puzzle or mislead, first because it is applied to different things, and uncertainty about which is in question is often possible, and secondly because in two of these senses its relation to its parent word human is clear only to those who are acquainted with a long-past chapter of history. The newspaper reader sometimes gets the impression that humanist means a great classical scholar. Why? he wonders, and passes on. Another time he gathers that a humanist is a sceptic or an agnostic or a freethinker or something of that sort, you know; again he wonders why, and passes on. Another time he feels sure that a humanist is a Pragmatist or Positivist or Comtist, and here at last, since he knows that Comte founded the Religion of Humanity, there seems to be some reason in the name. And lastly he occasionally realizes that his writer is using the word in the sense in which he might have invented it for himself—one for whom the proper study of mankind is man, the student, and especially the kindly or humane student, of human nature, a humanitarian, in fact, in the popular sense of that word [...]
That righteous rage? Just search for the simple words:
proposition. The use as a VOGUE WORD is American in origin. The OED Supp. quotes from Owen Wister: 'Proposition' in the West does in fact mean whatever you at the moment please.
This remark, made in 1902, seems now to have become true in Britain also. Those who will look through the examples collected below may perhaps be surprised to see the injury that this single word is doing to the language, and resolve to eschew it. It won its popularity partly because it combined the charms of novelty and length, and partly because it ministers to laziness; there is less trouble in using it than in choosing a more suitable word from the dozen or so whose places it is apt to usurp.
Lots of examples follow in this entry for "proposition". Some, like the first one below, seem outrageous to me as a non-native speaker:
Used for undertaking, occupation, trade: He has got a foothold mainly because the English maker has been occupied with propositions that give a larger proportion of profit.
Used for proposal: What's your proposition (i.e. how much will you offer?)
Used for possibility, prospect: Petrol at 6d. or 7d. a gallon was hardly a commercial proposition.
[...]
And just when you thought he was over:
The crowning outrage on this longsuffering word is its use as a verb in the sense of make amatory advances. This originated as U.S. slang, but now seems to have won a foothold in serious writing on both sides of the Atlantic. The central idea is of a donnish household in which the stingy economist husband is suddenly propositioned in the middle of the night by his wife's college girl friend.
Had he lived to read facebook or tumblr posts, Fowler would have been miserable. And an extremely popular meme maker, mixing sports metaphors and Tennyson, newspaper quotes and Shakespeare, memory and desire.
January 30, 2021
Given to me by my father at the end of high school, as he thought that I should be interested in this sort of stuff.
He was right, though I was not as enthusiastic then as I was a few years later.
Should have told him - I had almost 50 years to say thanks, with the proper enthusiasm. But I didn't.
Well, that's the human condition.
He was right, though I was not as enthusiastic then as I was a few years later.
Should have told him - I had almost 50 years to say thanks, with the proper enthusiasm. But I didn't.
Well, that's the human condition.
July 27, 2019
The excellent second edition
Before we presume to be artists or journalists or even readable purveyors of newsletters (or Internet blogs, for that matter) we must of necessity, if we are to be effective, be craftsmen.
Such a sentiment would, I imagine, sit well with Henry Watson Fowler who, some eighty years ago in collaboration with his younger brother Frank, wrote this famous book of English language guidance and prescription (and proscription!). Central to his purpose was the belief that the right word at the right time in its proper place and context constituted the backbone and much of the muscle and sinew of forthright and effective writing. That belief along with Fowler's celebrated passion for good writing and his intolerance of ignorance and humbug, coupled with his sometimes incomparable expression, long ago won him the undying respect and admiration of careful writers of the English language the world over.
And this has been something of a problem. Since Fowler last set pen to page some seventy-one years ago (he died in 1933), the English language has changed and grown enormously. What was correct and effective in 1926 (the year the 1st Ed. of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was published), as well as what was ineffective, offensively brash or downright ugly has in some cases become acceptable and even felicitous. So, like it or not, Fowler had to be updated, and of course there was no shortage of lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, journalists and others looking to do the job. Furthermore, the "Great Divide" between American English and British English needed to be explained, recorded, and codified. Some of the people who have joined in this enterprise over the years have been H. L. Mencken, Jens Jespersen, Margaret Nicholson, Dwight MacDonald, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, and more recently, Bryan A. Garner and R.W. Burchfield (who edits the Third Edition of this book), and many others. I think all of them, if they looked over their shoulder would see upon the wall an especially sober portrait of Fowler passing silent judgment upon their protracted labors. Certainly on their desks would be this book.
And of course there is Sir Ernest Gowers who revised and edited this celebrated Second Edition. He writes in the Preface that the most important changes he had to make were those of vocabulary itself. "Words unknown in Fowler's day--teenager for instance--are now among our hardest worked." He adds that "Vogue words get worn out and others take their place." He admits to having omitted "one or two" of Fowler's famous little essays as being "no longer relevant to our literary fashions." (Would that he had preserved such specimens in an appendix.) He also allows that "many" of Fowler's "articles" called "for some modernization," and therefore, "a few have been rewritten in whole or part, and several new ones added."
So this is not your pristine Fowler's, yet so carefully did Gowers preserve and build upon that earlier edifice that most people have been quite pleased. In fact so nearly universal has been the admiration for this particular book that the so-called Third Edition of 1996, edited by the aforementioned Burchfield, has yet to receive universal acceptance and is indeed disparaged in some circles as not being true to the letter and spirit of Fowler.
For me two things stand out in this much admired Second Edition: (1) the absolute delight one finds in the many pronouncements on language; and (2) the odd but satisfying mix of the old-fashioned prescriptive grammarian commingled with someone who disdains pedantry for its own sake, and condemns what is seen as unnecessarily purist. Perhaps more than anything what one loves about this book is Fowler's incisive dry wit. Here is Fowler/Gowers on two words easily confused (those are my quotation marks since Amazon does not support the italics used in the original):
prescribe, proscribe. These words are often confused, especially by the use of "pro-" for "pre-." "Pro-" means to put outside the protection of the law, to denounce as dangerous; "pre-" means to lay down as a rule or direction to be followed. "If I look at the list of proscribed authors in our various universities, I notice with pleasure that since 1940 no year has passed without Jane Austen appearing in the syllabus of at least one." The speaker clearly did not mean, as one might infer from the word he used (or perhaps the printer substituted), that Jane Austen's works were on the Index.
Also of interest here is Gowers' Preface which amounts to an understanding and appreciation of Fowler and his work.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
Before we presume to be artists or journalists or even readable purveyors of newsletters (or Internet blogs, for that matter) we must of necessity, if we are to be effective, be craftsmen.
Such a sentiment would, I imagine, sit well with Henry Watson Fowler who, some eighty years ago in collaboration with his younger brother Frank, wrote this famous book of English language guidance and prescription (and proscription!). Central to his purpose was the belief that the right word at the right time in its proper place and context constituted the backbone and much of the muscle and sinew of forthright and effective writing. That belief along with Fowler's celebrated passion for good writing and his intolerance of ignorance and humbug, coupled with his sometimes incomparable expression, long ago won him the undying respect and admiration of careful writers of the English language the world over.
And this has been something of a problem. Since Fowler last set pen to page some seventy-one years ago (he died in 1933), the English language has changed and grown enormously. What was correct and effective in 1926 (the year the 1st Ed. of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was published), as well as what was ineffective, offensively brash or downright ugly has in some cases become acceptable and even felicitous. So, like it or not, Fowler had to be updated, and of course there was no shortage of lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, journalists and others looking to do the job. Furthermore, the "Great Divide" between American English and British English needed to be explained, recorded, and codified. Some of the people who have joined in this enterprise over the years have been H. L. Mencken, Jens Jespersen, Margaret Nicholson, Dwight MacDonald, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, and more recently, Bryan A. Garner and R.W. Burchfield (who edits the Third Edition of this book), and many others. I think all of them, if they looked over their shoulder would see upon the wall an especially sober portrait of Fowler passing silent judgment upon their protracted labors. Certainly on their desks would be this book.
And of course there is Sir Ernest Gowers who revised and edited this celebrated Second Edition. He writes in the Preface that the most important changes he had to make were those of vocabulary itself. "Words unknown in Fowler's day--teenager for instance--are now among our hardest worked." He adds that "Vogue words get worn out and others take their place." He admits to having omitted "one or two" of Fowler's famous little essays as being "no longer relevant to our literary fashions." (Would that he had preserved such specimens in an appendix.) He also allows that "many" of Fowler's "articles" called "for some modernization," and therefore, "a few have been rewritten in whole or part, and several new ones added."
So this is not your pristine Fowler's, yet so carefully did Gowers preserve and build upon that earlier edifice that most people have been quite pleased. In fact so nearly universal has been the admiration for this particular book that the so-called Third Edition of 1996, edited by the aforementioned Burchfield, has yet to receive universal acceptance and is indeed disparaged in some circles as not being true to the letter and spirit of Fowler.
For me two things stand out in this much admired Second Edition: (1) the absolute delight one finds in the many pronouncements on language; and (2) the odd but satisfying mix of the old-fashioned prescriptive grammarian commingled with someone who disdains pedantry for its own sake, and condemns what is seen as unnecessarily purist. Perhaps more than anything what one loves about this book is Fowler's incisive dry wit. Here is Fowler/Gowers on two words easily confused (those are my quotation marks since Amazon does not support the italics used in the original):
prescribe, proscribe. These words are often confused, especially by the use of "pro-" for "pre-." "Pro-" means to put outside the protection of the law, to denounce as dangerous; "pre-" means to lay down as a rule or direction to be followed. "If I look at the list of proscribed authors in our various universities, I notice with pleasure that since 1940 no year has passed without Jane Austen appearing in the syllabus of at least one." The speaker clearly did not mean, as one might infer from the word he used (or perhaps the printer substituted), that Jane Austen's works were on the Index.
Also of interest here is Gowers' Preface which amounts to an understanding and appreciation of Fowler and his work.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
October 3, 2012
I love this book whole-heartedly.
I won't pretend that with this one work you can leap from ignorance to expert knowledge, but if you already have a fair grasp of good usage, and are willing to have to look up the occasional technical term, this is an invaluable guide to the points you sometimes doubt, or know from practice but have never entirely understood.
The age of this edition is no hindrance in this. I find that on occasions when I need to be absolutely right, what I really need to do is to be acceptable to the irritable-retired-colonel type, and as he had his schooling before this edition was printed, it is entirely modern enough.
It is also well worth keeping to hand to browse when the mood takes you. In a way that seems uncommon in newer technical works the personality of the expert author shines through. He is passionate and knowledgeable and he wants to share, and to educate, and above all to help. He is sympathetic and helpful, never patronising or arrogant. He has warmth and charm, and a certain dry humour. Best and rarest of all, for a grammatical expert, he hates pedantry, accepts change, and explains in detail why you may split as many infinitives as you wish.
I won't pretend that with this one work you can leap from ignorance to expert knowledge, but if you already have a fair grasp of good usage, and are willing to have to look up the occasional technical term, this is an invaluable guide to the points you sometimes doubt, or know from practice but have never entirely understood.
The age of this edition is no hindrance in this. I find that on occasions when I need to be absolutely right, what I really need to do is to be acceptable to the irritable-retired-colonel type, and as he had his schooling before this edition was printed, it is entirely modern enough.
It is also well worth keeping to hand to browse when the mood takes you. In a way that seems uncommon in newer technical works the personality of the expert author shines through. He is passionate and knowledgeable and he wants to share, and to educate, and above all to help. He is sympathetic and helpful, never patronising or arrogant. He has warmth and charm, and a certain dry humour. Best and rarest of all, for a grammatical expert, he hates pedantry, accepts change, and explains in detail why you may split as many infinitives as you wish.
June 29, 2014
a wonderful, funny, knowledgeable, opinionated book, for those who love words and language. But beware of the ebook version. It seems to be a poor scan of the text, which no one ever bothered to proofread.
November 4, 2010
I think this book is the most amazing book in the entire world!!! IF YOU DON'T READ THIS, LIFE'S NOT WORTH LIVING.
Read
February 28, 2011the latest edition, while more accurate, lacks some of the curmudgeonly editorializing that earlier editions had
November 28, 2014
A faithful place of refuge when in pedantic mode both as a corrective and a comfort.
January 13, 2018
[This review is of the Oxford World's Classics edition published by Oxford University Press and edited by David Crystal, not the older version edited by Gowers.]
Back in the early 2000s, the software company I worked at had some unused books left over from a project, including a late printing of the first edition of H. W. Fowler’s *A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,* first published Great Britain in 1926. So I snagged it. As David Crystal says in his introduction to this new Oxford World’s Classics reprint, Fowler “writes with an attractive frankness, passion, and sincerity, so that even when we disagree with him we recognize that here is someone who has the best of intentions toward the wellbeing of the language. The impression he gives is of an endearingly eccentric, schoolmasterly character, driven at times to exasperation by the infelicities of his wayward pupils, but always wanting the best for them and hoping to provide the best guidance for them in a world where society and language are undergoing rapid change....We encounter entries which display a vivid and imaginative turn of phrase, especially to express his mock-suffering in the face of bad usage.” To a certain kind of reader, one who adores the English language and has a relationship with it akin to one’s relationship with a sibling, Fowler is a lot of fun. That many of the entries are out of date and may never have applied well to American usage at all only adds to the fascination. After over ninety years, you should consult this book to learn how to think about everyday language issues and not necessarily for guidance that you can apply. As an example of Fowler’s tone and approach, here is the opening of his article on *Pedantry:* “Pedantry may be defined…as the saying of things in language so learned or so demonstratively accurate as to imply a slur against the generality, who are not capable or not desirous of such displays. The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, and someone’s else’s ignorance. It is therefore not very profitable to dogmatize here on the subject; an essay would establish not what pedantry is, but only the place in the scale occupied by the author…”
The Oxford World’s Classic reprint (dirt cheap at £9.99 or US$17.95; I got it at half price during Oxford University Press’s annual holiday sale) features a fascimile of the entire book, plus the introduction by Crystal and an appendix of his notes on the entries, which are hit and miss: sometimes he notes how the language has since changed and sometimes he only wants to point a finger and call Fowler’s opinion strange or ridiculous. Overall, the notes are interesting enough to make this edition the one to get.
Back in the early 2000s, the software company I worked at had some unused books left over from a project, including a late printing of the first edition of H. W. Fowler’s *A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,* first published Great Britain in 1926. So I snagged it. As David Crystal says in his introduction to this new Oxford World’s Classics reprint, Fowler “writes with an attractive frankness, passion, and sincerity, so that even when we disagree with him we recognize that here is someone who has the best of intentions toward the wellbeing of the language. The impression he gives is of an endearingly eccentric, schoolmasterly character, driven at times to exasperation by the infelicities of his wayward pupils, but always wanting the best for them and hoping to provide the best guidance for them in a world where society and language are undergoing rapid change....We encounter entries which display a vivid and imaginative turn of phrase, especially to express his mock-suffering in the face of bad usage.” To a certain kind of reader, one who adores the English language and has a relationship with it akin to one’s relationship with a sibling, Fowler is a lot of fun. That many of the entries are out of date and may never have applied well to American usage at all only adds to the fascination. After over ninety years, you should consult this book to learn how to think about everyday language issues and not necessarily for guidance that you can apply. As an example of Fowler’s tone and approach, here is the opening of his article on *Pedantry:* “Pedantry may be defined…as the saying of things in language so learned or so demonstratively accurate as to imply a slur against the generality, who are not capable or not desirous of such displays. The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, and someone’s else’s ignorance. It is therefore not very profitable to dogmatize here on the subject; an essay would establish not what pedantry is, but only the place in the scale occupied by the author…”
The Oxford World’s Classic reprint (dirt cheap at £9.99 or US$17.95; I got it at half price during Oxford University Press’s annual holiday sale) features a fascimile of the entire book, plus the introduction by Crystal and an appendix of his notes on the entries, which are hit and miss: sometimes he notes how the language has since changed and sometimes he only wants to point a finger and call Fowler’s opinion strange or ridiculous. Overall, the notes are interesting enough to make this edition the one to get.
Read
September 26, 2019A lexicographer, per Samuel Johnson, the granddaddy of the breed, is a “harmless drudge,” but Henry Watson Fowler may be the exception that proves the rule. It is one of the pleasures of his peerless Dictionary of Modern English Usage that, as astonishing as it may seem, its entries—an A-to-Z of questions of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice, formation, and pronunciation of words—reveal their author to be a man of good humor and good cheer. Animated throughout with brief humorous essays (try “Elegant Variation,” “Fused Participle,” “Novelty-Hunting,” or “Unequal Yokefellows”), Fowler's seven-hundred-odd pages are filled with delights, and his defanging of such beastly problems as Preposition at end and Split infinitive are not to be missed. In short, this most elegant, most essential of all English usage books will not only help you refine your writing, think more clearly, and bring you generally closer to heaven, but provide you with hours of entertaining reading as well.
May 29, 2017
I have had this 1986 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage on my bookshelf for over thirty years, and it really is a key text for any writer, as I was reminded this weekend in conversation with Frank Moorhouse at the Sydney Writers Festival - his wonderful essay 'Is Writing a Way of Life?' in the latest Meanjin mentions that as a young journalist, he read a page of Fowler's a day. I'm not sure I ever tackled it in quite the same disciplined manner, but I definitely dog-eared its pages. Setting the date of 'read' to today, but that's more like 'so many, many days'.
April 21, 2019
An old (first published in 1926) but still useful instruction in the correct use of English. Much of its value lies in the way that it explains, in simple, easy to understand terms, why certain rules exist as well as the meanings of words. An invaluable reference source.
I have marked this as 'read' but, of course, I have not read all of it; it is a work in progress, as a reference book I dip in and out.
I have marked this as 'read' but, of course, I have not read all of it; it is a work in progress, as a reference book I dip in and out.
July 25, 2018
I got this for Christmas, and I love it. It's a great reference book of course, but I love the dry humour when he advises against certain usage. For example where people pronounce Chorizo as 'choritso', as if it's an Italian word, he says: "If you wish to make an impression ... it is wise to make sure you choose the right language."
January 7, 2022
I used to own a 2nd Edition. It went the way of 'who knows where'. Bought another copy and was mortified that the 3rd Edition looks as though the script writers from Sesame Street had been let loose for this edition. I was just speechless...and that's saying something.
I'm chucking this one and getting the 2nd Edition, that has been 'dumbed down' for the 90's!!!
I'm chucking this one and getting the 2nd Edition, that has been 'dumbed down' for the 90's!!!
August 2, 2018
To say one has read this book is not really the way to describe experiences with it.
"Used" this book is more like it.
If you want to use the word correctly, as in Standard Written English or whatever they call it in the UK, then this dictionary is worth having around.
"Used" this book is more like it.
If you want to use the word correctly, as in Standard Written English or whatever they call it in the UK, then this dictionary is worth having around.
February 15, 2022
Unlike most books I review, I can't claim to have read all of this book. A solid foundation for understanding the rules of English Grammar, but tough sledding in places. Not something to pick up looking for a simple "How do I ..." guide.
January 9, 2019
A very useful reference book on words and usage for writers and editors.
December 9, 2019
I’m calling this read even though it’s a reference book having read the front matter and I’ll be working this little by little over the next couple of months.
Want to read
September 18, 2020Recommended here.
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