Modern English Usage
| Author | H. W. Fowler |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1926 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| OCLC | 815620926 |
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words (homonyms and synonyms), and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, and reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition, re-titled as The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised in 2004) was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, re-titled Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, is like the third edition. Informally, users refer to the dictionary as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler’s.
In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry W. Fowler’s general approach encourages a direct, vigorous writing style, and opposes all artificiality, by firmly advising against convoluted sentence construction, the use of foreign words and phrases, and the use of archaisms. He opposed pedantry, and ridiculed artificial grammar rules unwarranted by natural English usage, such as bans on ending a sentence with a preposition; rules on the placement of the word only; and rules distinguishing between which and that. He classified and condemned every cliché, in the course of which he coined and popularised the terms battered ornament, Wardour Street, vogue words, and worn-out humour, while defending useful distinctions between words whose meanings were coalescing in practice, thereby guiding the speaker and the writer away from illogical sentence construction, and the misuse of words. In the entries "Pedantic Humour" and "Polysyllabic Humour" Fowler mocked the use of arcane words (archaisms) and the use of long words.
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