Customer Reviews

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition (Worlds Classics Hardback)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Here's the deal with Fowler's.

1918: Henry Watson Fowler dies.

1926: First irascible version of his "Dictionary of Modern English Usage" published. Owing to the author's idiosyncrasies and clear-headed prescriptions, it earns a place on every writer's shelf.

1965: An new edition comes out, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers. Most people believe Gowers only brought the language up-to-date where absolutely necessary, keeping the spirit of the original intact. In other words, this revision was hailed as welcome and necessary.

1996: Massive overhaul of the text published, edited by the famous Robert W. Burchfield. Burchfield thoroughly changes the language and even the spirit of Fowler's original, resulting in a book that is much more observational than prescriptional. Much of what made the original beloved was excised.

2009: David Crystal digs up the 1926 edition, reprints it, and writes a big honkin' essay at the end, (almost needlessly) justifying the resuscitation of the original.

Thus what we have is generally thought to be superior to the 1996 edition, but I think most writers and editors would have been happy to do without Crystal's contributions and simply had Oxford University Press flood the world with a bunch of reprints of the 1965 edition, which, since that's the one everybody seems to want, is becoming danged hard to find.

Fowler's strong and often cranky opinions are all here, expressed in his elegant prose. Notes and other material by David Crystal are all interesting; as always, Crystal knows what he's talking about when he talks about the English language.

The main text of this reprint is an exact copy of my worn, brittle original, except that the new edition ends with the penultimate page, page 741. Page 742 is entirely blank, depriving the reader of Fowler's final entries for "Z", about two-thirds of a page. It looks as though some summer intern or apprentice printer thought that the page had to be blank because it precedes a section of David Crystal's new material.

The book is still entirely worthwhile even without the missing page. One can only wonder what Fowler (and Oxford's printers of yore) would say about the error.

Inspired by my acquisition of Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition," I have now embarked on reading it from cover to cover. Up to now, I have randomly read, in tattered volumes, a lot of the first edition, but not the entire, delightful work -- with all its captivating obscurities, clarities, inconsistencies, insights, and sly humor.

Much as I admire Fowler, I know this will not be an easy exercise.

Even other admirers, far better language experts than I, warn of difficulties ahead:

For example, here is admirer Sir Ernest Gowers, the first reviser of "Modern English Usage" in 1965:

"What is the secret of [the book's] success? It is not that all Fowler's opinions are unchallengeable. Many have been challenged. It is not that he is always easy reading. At his best he is incomparable. But he never forgot what he calls 'that pestilent fellow the critical reader' who is 'not satisfied with catching the general drift and obvious intention of a sentence' but insists that 'the words used must ... actually yield on scrutiny the desired sense.' There are some passages that only yield it after what the reader may think an excessive amount of scrutiny -- passages demanding hardly less concentration than one of the more obscure sections of a Finance Act, and for the same reason: the determination of the writer to make sure that, when the reader eventually gropes his way to a meaning, it shall be, beyond all possible doubt, the meaning intended by the writer."

Even worse, nonadmirer Brendan Gill, in "Here at The New Yorker,'" savages Harold W. Ross, founder and first editor of the magazine, for his Fowler idolatry:

"[Ross] had the uneducated man's suspicion of the fickleness of words; he wanted them to have a limited, immutable meaning, but the sons of bitches kept hopping about from one sentence to the next. Ross was a foul-tongued man and he used curse-words to curse words. Nor were the goddam dictionaries the allies he thought they ought to be; they nearly always betrayed him by granting a word several definitions, some of which were maddeningly at odds with others. That was why Ross fell back with such relish upon Fowler's "Modern English Usage" -- the work of a petty tyrant, who imposed idiosyncrasies by fiat. Ross was awed by Fowler; he would have liked to hold the whip hand over words and syntax as Fowler did."

Randomized as my previous reading of "Modern English Usage" is, I still recognize how wrong-headed, and -hearted, Gill is about Fowler. Far from being Gill's "petty tyrant," Fowler often displays a linguist's knowledge and open-mindedness to complement his prescriptive tendencies. Perhaps most important, Fowler, apparently a modest soul, also displays many flashes of subtle, self-deprecating humor that help urge a reader on through even the densest entries in "Modern English Usage."

No wonder linguist David Crystal, in his fair-minded and thoughtful introduction to "The Classic First Edition," insists that only a full reading of the book does it -- and its author -- justice:

" ... to arrive at a balanced assessment of Fowler's contribution to the linguistic history of ideas, we need to retrace his method and his practice as fully as we can. Reading every word of Fowler [in "Modern English Usage"] is an enthralling, if often exhausting experience, but it enables us to go beyond the popular mythology and get a better sense of the intriguing personality and linguistic genius of this remarkable lexicographer."

Fowler's arguments are impeccable but a huge complaint is that the print is tiny, and the binding is uncomfortably cramped for the huge amount of the content. The next edition should come out with a larger sized paper and the annotations right beneath Fowler's own entries.

A little disappointing as it turns out to be an exact reprint of the Oxford University Press edition of 1926 (the US edition was in 1944). Granted it has added a useful historical 26 page introduction and some 50 pages of interesting notes at the end by David Crystal. These additions actually make this edition worth buying. Even if you own a copy of the earlier printing as I do. Alas, as is all to often these days, I can open my 1950 edition and it STAYS OPEN.Thus making it easy to read and refer to ... I open this new edition and it shuts - closes on its own. Bad binding? Pages cut too tight. To thick a paper stock? Aggravating in the extreme. Particularly in a reference book! Shame on you, Oxford University Press!

Richard Cady

Richard Cady Rare Books

The paperback reissue is a great Amazon value. An English friend recommended it, and I enjoy Fowler's sometimes stuffy but always amusing rants. Not the most modern of English usage dictionaries, but that's what makes it so charming.

I'm so pleased to find this book on Amazon. It is a delight to read - sensible and well-thought out comments. This books represents a kind of wonderful English scholarship that has sadly disappeared. Fowler is literate, personal, and great fun. Crystal's introduction, on the other hand, is the usual post-modern analysis - not helpful and not interesting.

H.W. Fowler's, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, "Edited" by David Crystal. What a disappointment! I expected SOMETHING in addition to the original Fowler. Exactly what did David Crystal "edit"? I note with great interest that the spine of the dust jacket says "Edited" while the cover observes with greater veracity that only a new introduction and "notes" were contributed. I scanned the book for quite a while before finally realizing that the only notes are end notes in the back of the book, which, apparently, if you read the publisher's sales puffery, double as the "concluding section" of the book in which Prof. Crystal "examines" over 300 entries. This is a disturbingly inconvenient arrangement that forces the reader to turn to the notes after reading any of the thousands of entries on the off chance that it is one of the few to which Prof. Crystal has added a few words of his own.

More importantly, by definition the title of Fowler's work grows more misleading with each passing year. Fowler's writing is so dated it is difficult for a "modern" English speaker or writer to glean useful usage information from it. His examples seem to be so frequently in the negative that it can be extremely difficult to distinguish proper usage from im-. As a piece of history, you may want this book on your shelf. As a primary source of proper usage information, don't waste your money or your time.

When my copy arrived, I discovered it is literally printed upside down. The text on the binding points one way, the text on the interior pages points the other way.

Nice in a way to know that even the boffins at Oxford University Press can miss an enormous book-sized typo. Makes the rest of us feel a little better.