Fowler’s Reissued

8 December 2009

Oxford University Press has just come out with a reprint of H.W. Fowler’s 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The question I have is why? What is the purpose of regurgitating moldy grammar advice from over eighty years ago?

Now I understand the economic motivations. The book is cheap to produce, no author advance, no copy editing, etc. Label it a “classic” (which it assuredly is), slap on a new foreward by a noted linguist (i.e., David Crystal), and it will undoubtedly sell pretty well.

Nor do I dispute that it’s a good thing that Fowler is still in print. It is indeed a “classic” and it should be available for those that need it. And since it just made it under the wire for the 1923 public domain cutoff when copyright was extended, it will not be on Google Books any time soon. But those who actually need it are few. It is of little value to anyone but libraries, logophiles, and linguists who investigate historical patterns of usage and grammatical advice—and most of those probably already own a copy. (As I do—which I consult maybe twice a year when I have a historical grammar question.) Ideally OUP should have kept it on its backlist, perhaps with a print-on-demand schedule. (Modern technology means that you don’t need large print runs and warehousing to maintain profitability for low-demand books.)

But no writer needs to (or should) consult Fowler on what the best practices are. No editor or publisher needs to (or should) use Fowler as an in-house standard. Fowler’s original is hopelessly out of date. Here are some examples, culled by leafing through the book and not through any kind of systematic selection:

fanfare. It is perhaps better to pronounce the word as a FRENCH WORD, since neither noun nor verb has become familiar English; but the verb, if used, can hardly be treated as foreign, & should be fănfār’. fanfaronade, however is common enough to be fully anglicized.

dean, doyen. The FRENCH WORD doyen, a bad stumbling-block to the mere English-speaker, & the unfamiliar GALLICISM dean, are equally objectionable; as there is nothing complicated about the idea to be expressed, senior, with the assistance if necessary of whatever noun may be appropriate, should be made to do the work.

flamboyant is a word borrowed from writers on architecture, who apply it to the French style [...] characterized by tracery whose wavy lines suggest the shape or motion of tongues of flame. It is now fashionable in transferred senses; but whereas it should be synonymous with flowing or flexible or sinuous or free, it is more often than not made to mean florid or showy or vividly coloured or courting publicity. A word of which the true & the usual meanings are at odds is ambiguous, & could well be spared.

moslem, muslim. The OED treats the first as the ordinary English form, & there is no doubt that it is so. Correction into muslim is to be deprecated.

gibber, gibberish. The first is usually pronounced with soft g, & occasionally spelled ji-; the second is pronounced with hard g, & was sometimes spelled gui- or ghi- to mark the fact.

I’m not trying to criticize Fowler here. These were probably all sound pieces of advice in 1926, but they are laughable today. But I’m pointing out that for the vast majority of those who purchase it, a usage manual this old is just not useful. (Fowler is somewhat inconsistent and idiosyncratic, albeit much better than most grammarians, but that’s a topic for another post.)

There are enough good, current books on usage that don’t get their due, and even more that don’t get published. We don’t need a mass-market version of a creaky, eighty-plus-year-old book elbowing better, more current books off store shelves.

(Languagehat has some good comments on David Crystal’s introduction to the new edition.)

(Disclosure: Oxford University Press is also the publisher of my book, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Additionally, if you click through the link and make a purchase, I receive a very small referral payment from Amazon.com.)

Holiday Gift Ideas

3 December 2009

The holiday shopping season is once again upon us and it’s time for our annual list of gift ideas for that logophile in your life, be that person a friend, family member, or yourself. The following are some (mostly) new books that any lover of words and language would like to have on their shelf.

First up, of course is Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends; the paperback version of which is new this year. If you haven’t purchased it already, buy two as penance.

Another one new in paperback this year is Michael Quinion’s Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary. Like the title, this book is a delectable mixture of linguistic and etymological tidbits. You can read my full review of the book here. Another good choice along the same lines is Susie Dent’s What Made the Crocodile Cry? Read the full review here. A bit different, is Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages, one man’s yearlong foray into that biggest of dictionaries, reviewed in full here.

A bit more on the blue side is Stephen Dodson’s (a.k.a. Languagehat) and Robert Vanderplank’s Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World. Read the full review here. Also out this year is the new edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, the definitive study of that most notorious of words. But even if you have an earlier edition, this latest one is significantly expanded and well worth picking up.

On the more serious side, there are several good selections for writers. The best usage manual on the market is Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. It’s not new, but it’s invaluable. More recent is Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition, which I review here. Another great resource for writers is the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which I review here. And if you’re a copyeditor, you should definitely pick up Carol Fisher Saller’s The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice From Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself, which I review in full here. Finally, a great web resource is a subscription to the Visual Thesaurus, which I review here.

Lovers of slang will enjoy Michael Adams’s Slang: The People’s Poetry. This is a serious, but not sonorous or soporific, look at slang, reviewed here.

Finally, a more esoteric and expensive resource. Just out is the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. If you’ve got the money to spend on it, it’s a great book to have on hand. I haven’t reviewed it, but you can read Languagehat’s review here.

Happy shopping and here’s wishing you the best this holiday season!

(Disclosure: I received free review copies of some of these books. Oxford University Press, the publisher of many of them, is also the publisher of my book, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Additionally, if you click through the links and make a purchase, I receive a very small referral payment from Amazon.com.)

Review: What Made the Crocodile Cry?

27 November 2009

It’s a rule that anyone who writes about language must produce at least one book of short articles about quizzical and anomalous facts about language—the bathroom reader. I don’t know why, but every writer about language has to do it. This time around, the writer in question is Susie Dent and the book is What Made the Crocodile Cry?: 101 Questions about the English Language.

Dent’s entry into the genre, as those familiar with her annual Language Reports would expect, is a solid one. She poses and then answers questions about language, etymology, grammar, dialect, and so on. In addition to the title question about the phrase crocodile tears, she asks: Why are spare ribs spare? What is the longest word in English? Why do we call hooligans yobs? And so on. The answers are a few paragraphs long and well researched. A few of the topics, like the aforementioned yobs, address British English, but the book is not so parochial that Americans and English speakers from elsewhere in the world will be put off.

My only complaint about the book is how she treats that most notorious of four-letter words. In the answer to the question, is bloody still a swear word? Dent writes, “the fact that we encounter f***, for example, with such frequency seems to have shaken little of the power it has held for over 500 years.” And in the question about the Oxford comma, she notes the lyrics to the song Oxford Comma by the group Vampire Weekend, “who gives a f*** about the Oxford comma?” If you are going to write commentary about swear words, you need to be able to write those words without bowdlerization. If you can’t write fuck, don’t bring the word up. 

If you like this sort of book, and judging by the way that publishers keep churning them out evidently many people do, this is a good choice. It’s eclectic, entertaining, and informative.

What Made the Crocodile Cry?: 101 Questions About the English Language
Susie Dent
Hardcover; Oxford University Press
$18.05

(Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book. Oxford University Press is also the publisher of my book, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Additionally, if you click through the links and make a purchase, I receive a very small referral payment from Amazon.com.)

The Demise of The Independent Bookstore

18 November 2009

For many years now, people have been bemoaning the loss of the local, independent bookseller. A few decades back it was big chains like Border’s and Barnes and Noble threatening the independent bookstore. Now it’s internet retailers like Amazon that are the big threat, and which are also threatening the chains. Here in Berkeley, we recently lost two great bookstores, Cody’s and Black Oak Books. (Although Cody’s demise was as much due to unwise and ludicrously optimistic expansion as it was to competition, and Black Oak still lives on without their flagship storefront.)

I’ve never understood why this is a bad thing. To be sure, many small, independent bookstores have their charms and are pleasant places to visit and browse for books and their staff generally is more knowledgeable than that of big chains, but by their nature they have limited inventory. The competition that is killing them has far superior selection and makes available a much wider range of books at lower prices. The independent bookstore is more attractive as an ineffable ideal than as a cold, commercial reality. The reality is that more and better books are available to more people at lower prices than ever in history. You no longer have to live in Manhattan or San Francisco to find great books. The guy in the cabin with a DSL line in Elkbutt, Montana has as much access to books as the Fifth Avenue socialite.

Then the inimitable Clay Shirky comes along and summarizes the situation and puts forward a potential solution, a vision of what the independent bookstore could become. It is well worth a read.

2009 Words of the Year

16 November 2009

The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected their word of the year for 2009, and that word is unfriend. The runners up are here. (It’s a bit early to be selecting words. After all we’ve still got more than a month to go. But I guess like hanging Christmas decorations, this stuff gets earlier each year. And it isn’t very catchy to say, “Word of 15 November 2008 through 16 November 2009.)

Of course, we do a words of the year thing here too, but it’s a bit less formal. I don’t select a single word, but rather use the opportunity to learn about and generate discussion on new words and phrases that are out there. So post your suggestions here.

The American Dialect Society is collecting suggestions for their selection of word of the year and word of the decade. (The selection will be in early January, as it should be.) You can send them directly to woty AT americandialect.org. I’ll also be sending the best ones posted here to Grant Barrett and the nominating committee.