Fowler's Modern English Usage (Re-Revised 3rd Edition)

This Burchfield edition is not the same as the original.

To be frank, however. the original wasn't as good as many people claim in my opinion. Although amusing in parts I always found Fowler very capricious and arbitrary with tortous and baffling explanations.

I realize, however, that many writers swear by him but I just never got him, I'm afraid.

As several other reviewers have pointed out, this book should not have Fowler's name on it. A usage guide is supposed to be moderately prescriptive, as Fowler's book was and Gowers' subtle revision remained. (I don't presume to question Burchfield's credentials as a descriptive linguist, but he was clearly not a suitable choice for this project.)

Buy a secondhand copy of the second edition (revised by Sir Ernest Gowers) instead.

Many people will want to use this book in order to clarify the usage of particular words and grammatical structures in order to improve their own use of English.

The book is descriptive, not prescriptive, although there are occasionally indications that certain usages are 'illiterate' or preferred in specific genres.

However, deviations from grammatical standards are presented as perfectly acceptable (e.g. beginning sentences with conjunctions or prepositions at the end of sentences where this is avoidable without creating ugly turns of phrase) purely on the basis of cited usage from, primarily, literary sources. Whilst I agree that a certain or even great latitude is necessary, particular in poetry and other literary genres, or when one wants to achieve a particular rhetorical effect, there is scant reference to the genres in which particular usages are generally found to be both acceptable and effective.

I teach scientific and technical translation (into English) and battle with students' use of rhetorical grammatical structures (e.g. 'but' at the beginning of sentences) in purely technical or informative texts, and it is of no help when a standard reference work cites this as a perfectly acceptable usage by citing the Bible or a poem by Milton.

99% of people that write English write formal English. 99% of the examples are literary, poetic or colloquial.

The book describes well what people do with English. It describes less well how people can ensure that their writing accords with the register of the genre they are writing in.

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.

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.