Not many books eleven years old deserve to be renoticed. But I’ve just bought the third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Or so its publishers, Oxford University Press, called it when it came out in late 1996. I reviewed it for The Economist, and I’m ever more impressed. It’s a fat book— 873 pages, in my paperback version — but if you can afford the shelf space and the money (the Indian paperback edition costs Rs 395), there’s no better guide.

Its one real error is its title. As I wrote at the time, it should be called Burchfield’s Modern English Usage. Its “reviser”, R.W. Burchfield, had spent many years editing the Oxford English Dictionary. He had at his command its vast paper and electronic databases, beside a personal one of current usage built up in the Eighties and Nineties. And he knew far more about the history of English words and usage than H.W. Fowler did, or indeed than anyone could have, when Fowler’s book first came out in 1926. A second edition, in 1965, was only lightly revised. This third one is not a brand-new work, but it is very different.

Fowler’s aim was basically prescriptive. His early years, from 1872 to 1899, were spent teaching classical languages and English at a public school. In those days most educated Englishmen spoke and wrote much as he did and taught his pupils to; and others, all agreed, should try to do the same. His target, as he once put it, was “the half-educated Englishman”. Today’s scholarship is much more descriptive, recording how English is used, not only how it ought to be.

Good sense

Besides, though he accepted America’s right to its version of the language, Fowler’s concern was strictly the British one. Burchfield, in contrast, drew equally on British and American sources, with input also from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (though not India: he discusses stay, for instance, as a rival to stop for reside temporarily, but not for doing so long-term. A later reviser of Burchfield’s work will surely cast his net more widely).

In both respects, Fowler’s book, as Burchfield fairly says, is by now “a fossil”, a “monument”, albeit “enduring”, to the standard English of southern England in the early 20th century. But it is seldom wrong, and it is always fun, full of his idiosyncrasies and sense of humour. Much of this, happily, Burchfield has preserved, while adding many individual touches of his own. He offers, for instance, po-faced, a wholly superfluous note on epistemic modality, an invention (it seems: I’m happy never to have heard of it) of modern grammarians, and I’ll wager he was chuckling as he wrote it.

He retains some weak bits of Fowler, such as a note on “ambiguous” uses of too which not only is unconvincing but also omits that truly ambiguous phrase I cannot commend too highly. In contrast, he knocks down Fowler on literary words, arguing that, since “literature” today accepts almost any word, there are no literary ones. That is utter illogic. It’s also untrue: next time you spot a stream flooding a field, tell your friends the freshet o’erspreads the lea, and see how many understand you.

But those are niggles. Overall, what marks Burchfield’s book is his knowledge of the history of individual words and usages, and his robust good sense on contested issues such as sexist language, the split infinitive, like/as or hopefully. He has good advice on countless small points, and most large ones, all of it as good in India as Britain. To anyone at times unsure “Is this English?” — which certainly includes me — I commend this book. Highly.

And no, I have no link whatever with its publishers.