The New Fowler's Modern English Usage

899 Pages·2000·29.75 MB·English

by  H. W. Fowler

THE NEW
¿Wow/er?s
Modem English Usage
REVISED EDITION

THE NEW
Modern
English
Usage
FIRST EDITION
by H.W. Fowler
REVISED THIRD EDITION
by R.W.Burchfield
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ISBN 0-19-860263-4
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CONFLICTING VIEWS
Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers.
Mr Podsnap in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, 1865
Grammar is like walking. You have to think about it when you start but
if you have to go on thinking about it you fall over. It should come as
second nature.
Alice Thomas Ellis in The Spectator, 1989
Was she becoming, like the century, illiterate?
a character in Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood, 1987
'How charming. Now, "Luney". How do you spell that?' Swayed by the
drawing of her breath, the [Haitian] girl took a moment to dream, then
said with a far-off resonance, 'You don' spell dat, ma'am, you sez it.'
Barbara Neil, The Possession of Delia Sutherland, 1993
DISLIKES
Comments by members of a Usage Panel on the use of hopefully as a
sentence adverb meaning 'it is to be hoped', as reported in the Harper
Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (2nd edn, 1985):
I have fought this for some years, will fight it till I die. It is barbaric,
illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.
I don't like chalk squeaking on blackboards either.
'Hopefully' is useful or it would not be used so universally.
'Grounded' meaning a withdrawal of privileges is a word I dislike. It's off
the television {Roseanne notably) but now in common use. (I just heard it on
Emmerdale Farm, where they probably think it's dialect). I would almost
prefer 'gated', deriving from Forties public school stories in Hotspur and
Wizard. Other current dislikes: 'Brits'; 'for starters'; 'sorted'; and (when used
intransitively) 'hurting'.
Alan Bennett in London Review of Books, 4 Jan. 1996