The Autocrat of English Usage

As someone who cares more than they should about the difference between “that” and “which,” I have a nearly bottomless appetite for reading about language and writing, no matter how pedantic. Case in point: Ben Yagoda’s piece about Henry W. Fowler, the author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which served as the The New Yorker‘s spiritual ancestor. Persnickety and permissive in equal parts—in other words, like the best editor you could ever hope for.

In The Language Wars (2011), Henry Hitchings writes that Fowler is “part of that nimbus of Englishness that includes a fondness for flowers and animals, brass bands, cups of milky tea, net curtains, collecting stamps, village cricket, the quiz and the crossword, invisible suburbs, invented traditions and pugnacious insularity.” The last bit, pegging Fowler as a priggish Mrs. Grundy—or an “instinctive grammatical moraliser,” as one contemporary, the linguist Otto Jespersen, put it—is, to some extent, deserved. Certainly, Fowler was no anything-goes descriptivist, and the range and pungency of the epithets he applied to what he saw as semantic blunders or “slovenly” (a favorite term) vogue words are notable. “Bureaucrat” is “barbarous”; “it depends” unfollowed by “upon” is “indefensible”; “recrudescence” is “disgusting”; “orotund” is “at once a monstrosity in its form & a pedantry in its use”; “meticulous” in the sense of “careful” is “wicked” and “ludicrous”; using “phenomenal” to mean “remarkable, extraordinary, or prodigious . . . is a sin against the English language.”