Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-wlg5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T18:04:07.507Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Time for a new (but not ‘New’) Fowler

Review products

JeremyButterfield, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 901. Hardback £25, ISBN 978-0-19-966135-0

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2016

Robin Straaijer
Robin Straaijer*
Affiliation:
University of Leiden, The Netherlands
*
Email: r.straaijer@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Is English usage changing more rapidly than it was before? Judging by the decreasing time between editions of ‘Fowlers’ it would seem so: thirty-nine years between Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, from here on MEU1) and Gower's second edition (1965, from here on MEU2), and thirty-one years between the latter and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996, from here on NFMEU). This led Manfred Görlach to write in his review of NFMEU that ‘[t]imes change, and we (and usage) change with them. A new edition of Fowler's classic book is thus in order every thirty to forty years’ (Görlach, 1997).

Information

Type
Reviews
Information
English Today , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 57 - 61
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Allen, R. (ed). 1999. Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
British National Corpus. University of Oxford. Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk>. (accessed 28 May 2015).+(accessed+28+May+2015)>Google Scholar
Burchfield, R. 2000[1996]. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Busse, U., and Schröder, A. 2010. ‘How Fowler Became ‘The Fowler’: An Anatomy of a Success Story.’ English Today 26(2), 45–54.Google Scholar
Butterfield, J. 2007. Oxford A–Z of English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Butterfield, J. 2015. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
The Economist. 1997. ‘Burchfield's Moden English Usage,’ February 1.Google Scholar
Follett, W. 1966. Modern American Usage: A Guide. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Fowler, H. and Fowler, F. 1902[1908]. The King's English. 2nd edn.Oxford: The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Fowler, H. 2010[1926]. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Görlach, M. 1997. ‘The New Fowler's Modern English Usage.’ English World-Wide 18(2): 304–306.Google Scholar
Gowers, E. 1965. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Greenbaum, S. and Whitcut, J. 1988. Longman Guide to English Usage. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Heffer, S. 2010. Strictly English: the correct way to write… and why it matters. London: Random House Books.Google Scholar
Lamb, B. 2010. The Queen's English and how to use it. London: Michael O'Mara Books.Google Scholar
Oxford English Corpus. Oxford University Press. Available HTTP: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/about-the-oxford-english-corpus. (accessed 28 May 2015Google Scholar
Peters, P. 2004. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, P. 2006. ‘English Usage: Prescription and Description.’ In Aarts, B. and McMahon, A. (eds) The Handbook of English Linguistics (759–780). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pickett, J., Kleinedler, S. and Spitz, S. (eds). 2005. The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Rooney, A. 1997. ‘Pardon my English.’ Buffalo Evening News, 4 February.Google Scholar
Sayce, K. 2006. What Not To Write: a guide to the dos and don'ts of good English. London: Words at Work.Google Scholar
Sheidlower, J. 1996. ‘Elegant Variation and All That.’ The Atlantic Monthly, December.Google Scholar
Straaijer, R. 2014. The Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database. Leiden University. Available HTTP: <http://huge.ullet.net>..>Google Scholar
Straaijer, R. forthc. ‘A Perspective on Prescriptivism: Language in reviews of The New Fowler's Modern English Usage.’ In Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing standards across time and space, edited by Percy, Carol and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. 2010. ‘The Usage Guide: Its Birth and Popularity.’ English Today 26(2), 14–23, 44.Google Scholar