A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford World's Classics) [ハードカバー]

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."