Customer Reviews

The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed)

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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 Jonson.

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.

Fowler's Modern English Usage has served for nearly 80 years as the indispensable guide to anyone who wants to write clear and vigorous English. Nonetheless, 80 years is a long time to retain the word "modern" in the title of a book, and clearly the examples from newspapers of the first quarter of the 20th century have lost most of their currency, and even the examples from the literature of Fowler's period have aged as well. Clearly, therefore, some modernization was needed. This was partially achieved in the 2nd edition, edited by Ernest Gowers in 1965: Gowers did away with much of Fowler's idiosyncratic arrangement of his material, but he left most of the writing unchanged. Anyway, 1965 is also a long time ago, and much has changed since then.

A thorough rewriting was therefore probably needed, and there is much to admire in Burchfield's 3rd edition. If Fowler's book had never existed, and Burchfield's were the first of its kind, one might even praise it as an excellent reference. Unfortunately for Burchfield, however, Fowler's book did precede it, and it is impossible to read Burchfield on any topic without missing Fowler's way of handling the same topic. You may not agree with every opinion that Fowler expressed, but he never left you in any doubt about what he thought and why he thought it. Burchfield emerges as a wishy-washy committee man by comparison. Before undertaking the 3rd edition he was known for his excellent work on the Oxford English Dictionary, but compiling a dictionary is a very different business from writing a continuous piece of prose, and it is not obvious that skill in the one implies skill in the other. Gowers, incidentally, was known before he undertook the 2nd edition for his own books about clear writing. It would be an exaggeration to say that he single-handedly reformed the way that British civil servants write documents to be read by the general public, but he certainly made a large contribution to this.

Burchfield's book is not as bad as some critics maintain, and it has the merit of including many genuinely modern examples and of recognizing, as Fowler barely did, that English is a world language. It is worth having on your bookshelf, therefore, but not as a replacement for Fowler. For most people the edition of choice remains the 2nd edition -- easier to find your way around than the 1st edition, and retaining all of its force. It will not be surprising if Oxford decide in due course to reissue the 2nd edition, or, if that is too much of an admission of making a mistake, to issue a 4th edition that takes the 2nd as its starting point. At present it does not appear to be possible to buy a new copy of the 2nd edition, but it is not difficult to find a used copy.

Note added 19 August 2011. The publisher has indeed now reissued an earlier edition: not the 2nd, however, but the 1st, supplemented with an essay by David Crystal. I would have preferred the 2nd, but still it's an admission that the 3rd has not proved very popular. Caraculiambro's review of the reissue (entitled "they went back one too far") expresses my own thoughts very well.

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.

I can but concur that while Fowler's Modern English Usage is the outstanding, seminal work on the conventions, structure and usage of English, it is the second and not the third edition that lovers of English should buy. Fowler's knowledge and wit shine through his own work; Burchfield's tendentious, plodding and pseudo-scholarly revision has left little trace of such elements. If you want to see exactly what's wrong with Burchfield, try reading his observations on 'sexist language'; he is entitled to his opinions of what is acceptable usage, but he comprehensively misunderstands that in English the generic pronoun "he" is not the same word as the masculine personal pronoun that one spells and pronounces the same way. Burchfield's is a fallacy of comprehension, and not merely (which would be quite as bad in someone affecting to advise on English usage) an inability to write clear and idiomatic English.

And if you want to see why Fowler is such a marvellous source of reference and learning, read (in the second edition) his clear and authoritative exposition of the difference, which is now rarely understood, between a gerund and a participle. Fowler, second edition, is the one work of reference that you should own.

If you aren't familiar with previous versions of Fowler's, don't be scared off by all the negative reviews here. If you work with words for a living (as I do), you must have a copy of the current edition. It is the only comprehensive -- and, importantly, comprehendible -- reference on English usage available. The current edition reflects modern standard usage. Perhaps it is not as prescriptive as earlier editions, but I would argue that you don't want it to be. English usage is in flux, and the author is wise enough not to enforce rules that are in the process of being naturally dismantled. He is wise enough to tell you precisely what the state of the language is now, enough to inform your own decisions. If you are an editor or a serious writer, you must have this book.

R. W. Burchfield has done for "Fowler" what the Mongol's did for the Chinese. Nothing good! If you enjoyed the wit and wisdom of the real "Fowler", you won't find ANY of that here. This is a dull and tedious COMPLETE rewrite.

With comments such as "The mystery remains: 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?", the only real mystery is why Folwer's name is attached to this book at all. Simple answer: MARKETING. Why would anyone buy (and read) this book? Another simple answer: DON'T! I certainly hope Oxford Press will continue to print the REAL (original) Fowler!

Ernest Gower, as editor of the second edition of Henry Fowler's "Modern English Usage" ("The New Fowler's Modern English" is being marketed as the third), made modest stylistically and logically consistent changes in order to honestly update the original. "The New Fowler's Modern English" in contrast rewrites it completely and makes a particular point of demonstrating its contempt for Henry Fowler--yet uses Fowler's name as a selling point. Be that as it may, this, "The New Fowler's Modern English", is bloated, tedious, clumsily written, and deadly dull--constantly belaboring the obvious. It's hard to imagine a native speaker of English finding any use for it at all.

I think that the issue most people have with the third edition of this book is the big word "Fowler's" on the cover. If it had simply been called "Modern English Usage," this book would, I think, be a very useful tool to most literary folk.

The second edition of Fowler's had charisma and wit on it's side. This book, the third is well... it is a good tool, and not much more.

Personally, I use both editions in different ways. When I was in school once sat down and read the second edition cover to cover, and I still, occasionally consult it. Because the third edition deals with Canadian English (and I suppose American too) I use it, infrequently, like I would a regular dictionary.

As a person who has long held Fowler's Grammatical works in highest esteem, this "new edition" comes as a grave disappointment to me.
It is more an inferior re-write than that which you might call a "New Edition".
Some might argue that the English language is in flux, and of course, this is true. However, when a significant part of this is entirely due to the perpetuation of improper word usage (often relegating original meanings and associated sentence structures to the archives), ratifying the inclusion of such examples, other than to point out that they are incorrect, is linguistic vandalism.
Purists and writers alike should go for the Second Edition; it is more accurate, more informative, and a more interesting and witty read.
Those people with sound knowledge of correct grammar are the only ones with any right to break the rules of grammar; they know what rules they are breaking, and why. This edition can only undermine the terrific utility of the Second Edition in this regard.

I've used the first three editions of this book, and find the second edition to be the most useful and interesting. I do not recommend any of this series to the casual English speaker who would only like to avoid glaring grammatical mistakes; there are simpler guides better targeting this. Key to efficiently benefiting from this book is knowing when to consult it. Thus, this book is best appreciated by someone with an already strong verbal command who recognizes opportunities to make subtle improvements.