Is H.W. Fowler’s 1926
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage still relevant and useful today, or should it be consigned to the dustbin of antiquated prescriptions for good English?
It shouldn't, says Warren Clements, co-author of
The Globe and Mail Style Book, who reviews the English-usage classic in the March 26, 2010 issue of
The Globe and Mail in the United Kingdom. Clements argues that Fowler’s voice about the English language remains lively and engaging despite the dismissive comment of R.W. Burchfield, editor of the book’s third edition in 1996, that the work had become a “fossil.” Burchfield had said that it was a mystery to him why “this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book” has “retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars.”
The Oxford University Press recently reissued in facsimile Fowler’s original guide to English grammar, spelling and writing, accompanied by an 18-page introduction and 40 pages of end-notes by British linguist David Crystal. “Fowler was largely a prescriptivist,” says Clements in his review. “Crystal, like Burchfield, is more of a descriptivist, but where Burchfield was unkind to Fowler, Crystal is of two minds: ‘Although the book is full of his personal likes and dislikes, his prescriptivism—unlike that practised by many of his disciples—is usually intelligent and reasoned.’”
About the re-issue of the Fowler’s original work, Clements expresses the hope that ideally, someone should bring Fowler’s work into the new century by simply giving it the same “sort of respectful dusting” that Ernest Gowers had done for its second edition in 1965. “In the meantime,” Clements says, “the marriage of Fowler’s ‘attractive frankness, passion and sincerity’ (Crystal’s words) and Crystal’s thoughtful, informed critique is a happy antidote to Burchfield’s 1996 decision that Fowler no longer deserved a central place in the book that still bears his name.”
Read Warren Clements’s “The Great Prescriptivist” in The Globe and Mail now!
