A Dictionary of American-English Usage [antikvár]

PREFACE'It is perhaps, then, rather a duty than a piece of presumption for those who have had experience in word-judging to take any oppor-tunity of helping things on by irresponsible expressions of opinion*MEU: Needless VariantsA Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, was first published in 1926. Its author, ex-schoolmaster, classicist, and lexicographer, had started work on it, in collaboration with his brother, in 1911. The First World War intervened, and in 1918 Francis George Fowler died; H. W. Fowler completed the project alone. Today 'MEU' remains one of the most loved, and most provocative, reference books, as indispensable as a dictionary, in America as well as in England. Fowler not only teaches you how to write; he is a demon on your shoulder, teaching you how not to write, pointing out and exhibiting, with terrifying clarity, your most cherished foibles: Love of the Long Word, Elegant Variation, Genteelism, Pedantry, Battered Ornaments. To tamper with Fowler has taken both humility and courageor perhaps fool-hardinessborn of the quotation given above.New words and idioms have come into the language since the publication of Modern English Usage; there are peculiarities of American speech and writing not recorded by Fowler; and many of us today, English and American, have neither the time nor the scholarship to follow through the fascinating but sometimes exasperating labyrinth of Greek and Latin parallels and Fowler's Socratic method of teaching by wrong examples. American-English Usage is an adaptation of MEU, not a replacement. AEU is a simplified MEU, with American variations, retaining as much of the original as space allowed. Many of the longer articles had to be shortened, many of the more academic ones and those less pertinent to usage today were omitted, to make room for new entries and illustrations. Fowler's own mannerisms and pedantriesand I am sure he would have been the last to deny themhave been left untouched. There was a temptation sometimes to soften the sting of 'illiterate,' 'journalese,' lady novelists,' 'uneducated writers'; perhaps Fowler himself would have tempered some of them had he revised his book, but only Fowler could decide that. They have been left as he wrote them.