A new edition of H.W. Fowler’s
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage has just been released by the Oxford University Press, a volume that’s described as an effort to rescue the prescriptivist author’s original vision for his 1926 work and put “Fowler back in charge of Fowler’s.” The original book had undergone two previous revisions—the first in 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers, whose editing won approbation as “judicious and light,” and the second in 1996 by the late lexicographer and linguist Robert W. Burchfield, whose revision was so extensive that it was described as having “expunged Fowler from Fowler’s.”
Burchfield, says Liam Julian in his review of the latest edition in the
Policy Review of the Hoover Institution, “changed Fowler’s from a prescriptive book to a descriptive one. Usage was no longer to be judged but understood. Entries that had earlier attacked ambiguity, castigated the careless, and lowered the boom on barbarism were suddenly more interested in explaining the origins and development of the English language’s scofflaws than in pointing them out and locking up.”
This time
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage has been re-released with corrections, annotations, and an often begrudging introduction by the British linguist David Crystal, a confirmed language descriptivist. In the new volume, Crystal writes of Fowler, “I sense a linguist inside him crying to get out, but being held back by a prescriptive conscience,” and faults Fowler for asserting so many principles and then breaking them so often.
But in his review of
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Julian asserts: “The books of descriptivists have their place as chronicles of language as it is actually used. The books of prescriptivists…give instruction in how language should be used, and they have their place, too.” He then pays tribute to Fowler and his re-released work, saying that “It is excellent that the original Fowler’s is now back on the shelves, helping us all to be clearer and more correct, still encouraging us to do better.”
Read Liam Julian’s “Putting Fowler Back in Fowler’s” in the Policy Review now!Read H. W. Fowler’s The King’s English now!
