The New Fowler's Modern English Usage [antikvár]

Preface to the Third Edition Henry Watson Fowler1 (1858-1933) is a legendary figure and his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (MEU), first published in 1926, is one of the most celebrated reference books of the twentieth century. It was the work of a private scholar writing in virtual seclusion in the island of Guernsey; later, after the 1914-18 war, he lived mostly in the village of Hinton St George in Somerset. His background was typical of that of hundreds of middle-class young men of the second half of the Victorian period: educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford (where he read Classics), he went on to spend seventeen years (1882-99) teaching Classics and English at Sedbergh School in north-west Yorkshire (now Cumbria). There followed a four-year period in London as a freelance essayist, after which he joined his younger brother, Francis George Fowler, in Guernsey in 1903. In two separate granite cottages, fifty yards apart, the brothers embarked on and completed three ambitious projects. First, they translated the Greek works of Lucian of Samosata (1905); they then wrote The King's English (1906), the precursor of MEU, and compiled The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911). After an adventurous interlude in the army in France in 1915-16, and after the death of his brother in 1918, Fowler finished the Pocket Oxford Dictionary in 1924, and MEU in 1926, by which time he was 68. What I want to stress is the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day, and his heavy dependence on schoolmasterly textbooks in which the rules of grammar, rhetoric, punctuation, spelling, and so on, were set down in a quite basic manner. For him, the ancient Greek and Latin classics (including the metrical conventions of the poets), the best-known works of Renaissance and post-Renaissance English literature, and the language used in them formed part of a three-coloured flag. This linguistic flag was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as possible, everything it represented was to be preserved intact. The book that emerged in 1926, Modern English Usage, was aimed at a domestic audience. Fowler disclaimed any knowledge of American English and by implication, the varieties of English spoken and written in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere. In a letter written to his publishers in 1911 he drew attention to further limits of his horizon: We have our eyes not on the foreigner, but on the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities who wants to know Can I say so-&-so? Is this use English? Not but what we may be of some use to the foreigner who knows English pretty well; but the foreigner as such we must leave out of consideration. For his illustrative examples Fowler often turned to the OED and drew on them to support his arguments. Above all, however, he turned to newspapers 1 An affectionate biographical sketch of Fowler by his friend G. G. Coulton was published in 1935 as Tract xliii of the Society for Pure English.