The new, third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage[1] is out, ta-rah, ta-rah! It was edited by Robert Burchfield, a New Zealander and Oxford don, author of numerous books on the English language and editor-in-chief of the venerable—if not sacrosanct—Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. As editor also of the Cambridge History of the English Language, Burchfield made himself a true citizen of Oxbridge. But an ox bridge can be no better than a pons asinorum.
Besides giving full due to American English and looking into other Englishes, F3— as I shall call it with a bow to Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6, a similarly daring enterprise in scaling the heights— boasts many other new features. H. W. Fowler’s F1, born a year after me in 1926, predates my linguistic interests. F2, from 1965, was a light revision by Sir Ernest Gowers, a user-friendly volume of 725 duodecimo pages, and much easier to handle than the current 864 octavo ones. It was also decently modest. It did not, like F3, proclaim itself on the jacket “The acknowledged authority on English usage,” the sort of self-advertisement worthy of Norman Mailer. And F3, of course, has a much jazzier jacket altogether.
It must be faced right off that Burchfield is essentially, though not entirely, of the descriptive rather than prescriptive school of language savants. Although he bridles at some usages, he is also astoundingly tolerant of others.
