Fowler's Modern English Usage

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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, often referred to simply as Fowler's Modern English Usage, or Fowler, is a style guide to British English usage. Fowler covers in detail many issues of usage, from plurals and literary techniques to distinctions between similar words and the usage of foreign terms.

Henry W. Fowler concentrated on British usage, and set the standard for all usage books to follow. Fowler's first edition of 1926 remained in print for many years, but more recent editions have updated the book.

Fowler's remark on the split infinitive is well-known:

"The English-speaking world may be divided into those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is, those who don't know, but care very much, those who know and approve, those who know and condemn, and those who know and distinguish."

Fowler concludes that split infinitives should not attract as much attention as they do, and says that they are indeed sometimes the best way to express one's meaning. See the split infinitive article for further discussion.

Only the first edition of the book was completely Fowler's. The second edition was a very light revision by Sir Ernest Gowers and the third edition was very substantially revised and rewritten by Robert Burchfield. The third edition is regarded by many as inappropriately liberal in its advice, in part because while it marks a number of constructions and phrases as "informal" it refuses to counsel against their usage in a fashion similar to earlier editions.

The difference between the first and second editions, on the one hand, and the third on the other, can be understood as a shift from prescriptive to descriptive linguistics; the criticism the third edition received is perhaps in part due to the popularity of earlier editions with proponents of prescriptive linguistics such as David Foster Wallace, who wrote approving of "Fowler's" in an essay in Harper's Magazine.

• First edition, 1926 (reprinted in 2003, see References below)
• 2nd edition, 1965
• 3rd edition, 1996 (The New Fowler's Modern English Usage)

See also

• Elegant variation
• Logorrhoea
• Pleonasm
• Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)
• Prescription and description

Related books

• The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White
• The Chicago Manual of Style, the authoritative guide to American English publishing style and markup (very little on usage in the sense of Fowler or Strunk and White). The Chicago Manual of Style (or CMOS) is increasingly considered, all over the English-speaking world, the authoritative guide to formatting and style questions of relevance to publishers of any English language text.
• Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers
• "A Dictionary of American-English Usage Based on Fowler's Modern English Usage", by Margaret Nicholson. 1950s Signet paperback, by arrangement with Oxford University Press.

References

• Fowler, Henry; Winchester, Simon (introduction) (2003 reprint). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford Language Classics Series). Oxford Press. ISBN 0198605064.
• Burchfield, R. W. (Editor); Fowler, H. W. (1996). The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198691262.
• Nicholson, Margaret; (1957). "A Dictionary of American-English Usage Based on Fowler's Modern English Usage". Signet, by arrangement with Oxford University Press.