Product Description

Fowler's Modern English Usage is the world-famous guide to English usage, loved and used by writers of all kinds. In keeping with its long tradition, Fowler's gives comprehensive and practical advice on grammar, syntax, style, and choice of words. It gives a clear and authoritative picture of the English we use, and elucidates many scores of usage questions such as the split infinitive and the intricacies of political correctness. It gives in-depth coverage of both British and American English with reference to the English of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The volume includes wide-ranging examples of usage from a broad selection of newspapers, journals, and books from across the globe, and features illustrative quotations from authors such as Agatha Christie, Chinua Achebe, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter, and Noel Coward. Based on the evidence and research of the Oxford Dictionaries Programme, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to usage available. The third edition of 1996 provided a complete revision and an expansion of the original text, bringing the book fully up to date on all matters of grammar, usage, syntax, and style. This is a reissue of the revised third edition of 1998, which includes a new Supplement and revised entries. Replaces isbn 0198602634.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10686 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 896 pages

Review
[Fowler's Modern English Usage] offers impeccable advice. (The Times )

About the Author
The original 'Fowler' was Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933), a teacher and writer. He was also the author, with his brother Francis, of The King's English (1906) and the first edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911).

Robert Burchfield (1923-2004), a New Zealander by birth, held the post of Chief Editor of Oxford English Dictionaries between 1971 and 1984 and was the Editor of the final volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplements. He was also the editor of The New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1986) and, with C. T. Onions and G. W. S. Friedrichsen, of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966).

Customer Reviews

Not really Fowlerian
Unlike the second edition of this venerable classic, this, the third, is thoroughly revised and brought up to date by R. W. Burchfield whose distinguished credentials include having been the Chief Editor of the Oxford English dictionaries from 1971 to 1984 and an editor of the Cambridge History of the English Language. The problem is that in doing so he has greatly lessened the prescriptive intent of Mr. Fowler and offended many readers.

Let's begin with the Preface in which he has the temerity of damning H.W. Fowler himself with faint praise and something close to dismissal. Burchfield asks: "Why has this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book...retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars for just on seventy years?" (p. ix) One gets the sense that Burchfield is going to straighten matters out forthwith. He adds, "Fowler's name remains on the title-page, even though his book has been largely rewritten..." In the next sentence he refers to Fowler's book as a "masterpiece," but adds that "it is a fossil all the same" while intimating that its scholarly scope did not extend beyond "the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century." (p. xi)

From there we go to the entries themselves and find on page one that the suffix "-a" is now

being printed more and more to present the sound that replaces "of" in rapid (esp. demotic) speech, as in "kinda" (=kind of), loadsa, sorta.

The problem with this is there is no acknowledgment that such usage, especially in written English, is substandard. Even in the entry on "demotic English," Burchfield merely notes that such formulations as "gotta," "shoulda," etc. are becoming more common.

Or consider his entry for "didn't ought" which includes this designation:

A remarkable combination of the marginal modal "ought" and the periphrastic negative auxiliary "didn't."

Huh? Burchfield reveals here that he has lost the thread of Fowler's intent. Instead of writing for a general educated public that would like some guidance in matters of usage, he is instead addressing scholars, linguists and others whose interest in such matters is professional and not practical. He goes on to allow that "didn't ought" is "[a]lmost certainly of dialectal origin" (I give that a "duh, dude") that "has made its way into novels of the 19c and 20c and into informal speech as a typical construction used by rustic or sparsely educated speakers."

Such is his way of "labeling," and it isn't very effective. True, he avoids outright condemnation, but forces the reader to closely examine his prose in order to realize, after some perusal, that if it is "a typical construction" of "rustic or sparsely educated speakers," it is probably substandard and ought to be avoided. Much of the book suffers from such circumlocutious expression and is entirely inimical to the spirit of Fowler who believed in concise, straightforward English.

Okay let's look at that favorite of English usage mavens around the world: "infer" versus "imply." Well, I think I'd have to be a lawyer to be certain that Burchfield got it right (although I don't doubt that he did) since I had to wade through several hundred words of qualification and extraneous example ("imply" used correctly; "infer" used correctly; "infer" illogically used for "imply"...) so that the most important distinction to be made between the words is lost, not to mention that by the time I had finished I felt like I needed to reread the passages and take notes.

What Burchfield is at pains to do is walk a fine line between being what Bryan A. Garner (who wrote the very fine Garner's Modern American Usage (2003) which I highly recommend) calls "describers" and "prescribers." As a compiler and editor of dictionaries, Burchfield leans toward the descriptive mode. He records usage and tries not to pronounce from on high what is or isn't right. The problem with this approach is that in a usage book the entire point is to make distinctions between what is acceptable and what is not, between what is effective and what is not. Burchfield's reluctance to be more prescriptive defeats the intent of a usage dictionary. Note that I am NOT suggesting that Burchfield doesn't know what he is talking about or that he lacks in any way the authority to write a usage dictionary. On the contrary.

Note also that Burchfield (who also wrote The New Zealand Oxford Pocket Dictionary) has not confined himself to BrE but has incorporated AmE and examples of usage from all around the world into Fowler's once more restrictive volume. This is actually to the good in my opinion, but certainly suggests that this book ought to be called something other than "Fowler's..." For this perhaps we can blame the Oxford University Press itself which clearly wanted to take advantage of Fowler's name and reputation. This book might be better appreciated if we were not forced to compare Burchfield with Fowler, which is somewhat like comparing Neil Simon to Ben Johnson.

Bottom line: a little stuffy, a little long-winded, somewhat pretentious, but for the careful reader, as authoritative a book on English usage as one could want.

It has the name but has lost the content
I have read the original and second edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage and they have the true essence of Fowler in them. This book, however, contains very little of Fowler's original work and views on English usage and might as well have been called Burchfield's English Usage as it is clear that he, in editing this book, has taken out all of the things which made Fowler the best English usage book, and added in his own views on the matters. He has simply used the good name of Fowler to put forward his own grammatical rules, which are not a patch on Fowler's, resulting in a very poor book. If you want the true Fowler, and I recommend it, then buy the first or second edition. They may be slightly outdated, but are far better than this book.

WARNING: Fowler has been kicked out of his own book.
Fans of Fowler will be greatly disappointed by this book, which seems to include nothing written by Fowler, but displays his name in large letters on the spine and cover. Burchfield admits in the preface that he does not understand Fowler's appeal, and does not even like his work: "The mystery remains: why has this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book, in a form only lightly revised once, in 1965, by Ernest Gowers, retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars for just on seventy years?" The answer to this question, I think, can be found in the how Burchfield and Fowler advise the reader on whether to put the period inside or outside of quotation marks. Burchfield begins with a wimpy "each system has its own merit", and proceeds to an absolute rule: Quotation marks "must be placed according to the sense". Even Garner (A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a far better book for American readers), who has great praise for Fowler, simply sets out conventional American and British usage. Only Fowler provides an analytical structure ("There are two schools of thought, which might be called the conventional and the logical") and then through clear thinking and perceptive example persuades us that "The conventional system flouts common sense, and it is not easy for the plain man to see what merit it is supposed to have to outweigh that defect". Persuasion is the element that Burchfield and other writers lack. Burchfield believes too much in the authority of the little edicts that make up each entry, even when the entry sets out nothing more than arbitrary convention, whereas Fowler believed that some conventions were bad, and he argued his positions with a passion and humanness that are absent from this book. So keep your first or second edition of Fowler. And shame on the publisher, who is misleading the public by calling the book "The New Fowler's Modern English Usage". Even when Burchfield is kind to Fowler -- for example, he refers to Fowler's entry on elegant variation as a "celebrated, leisurely essay" -- he does not include the essay.