Burchfield - The New Fowler's Modern English Usage 2e rev

The pronunciation system is that of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and, except where otherwise specified, is based on the pronunciation, widely called Received Pronunciation or RP, of educated people in southern England. The necessary adjustments have been made when standard American English pronunciations are given.
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Burchfield - The New Fowlers Modern English Usage 2e rev THE NEW ¿Wow/er?sModem English Usage REVISED EDITION THE NEWModernEnglish Usage FIRST EDITION by H.W. Fowler REVISED THIRD EDITION by R.W.Burchfield OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSOXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DPOxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,and education by publishing worldwide inOxford New YorkAthens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires CalcuttaCapeTown Chennai Dares Salaam Delhi Florence HongKong IstanbulKarachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity MumbaiNairobi Paris Säo Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsawwith associated companies in Berlin IbadanOxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Pressin the UK and in certain other countriesPublished in the United Statesby Oxford University Press Inc., New York© Oxford University Press 1968,1996 First edition 1926Second edition 1965Third edition 1996Revised third edition 1998Published in USA 2000All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriatereprographicsrightsorganization. Enquiries concerning reproductionoutside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,Oxford University Press, at the address aboveYou must not circulate this book in any other binding or coverand you must impose this same condition on any acquirerBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication DataData availableLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataData availableISBN 0-19-860263-4 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2Data-captured by Jayvee, Trivandrum, IndiaTypeset in Swift and Meta by Latimer Trend Ltd., PlymouthPrinted in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham For my beloved wifeSfizaùet/i^Austens G&urcfifîeldCONFLICTING VIEWS Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers. Mr Podsnap in Dickenss Our Mutual Friend, 1865 Grammar is like walking. You have to think about it when you start but if you have to go on thinking about it you fall over. It should come as second nature. Alice Thomas Ellis in The Spectator, 1989 Was she becoming, like the century, illiterate? a character in Iris Murdochs The Book and the Brotherhood, 1987 How charming. Now, Luney. How do you spell that? Swayed by the drawing of her breath, the [Haitian] girl took a moment to dream, then said with a far-off resonance, You don spell dat, maam, you sez it. Barbara Neil, The Possession of Delia Sutherland, 1993DISLIKESComments by members of a Usage Panel on the use of hopefully as asentence adverb meaning it is to be hoped, as reported in the HarperDictionary of Contemporary Usage (2nd edn, 1985): I have fought this for some years, will fight it till I die. It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable. I dont like chalk squeaking on blackboards either. Hopefully is useful or it would not be used so universally.Grounded meaning a withdrawal of privileges is a word I dislike. Its offthe television {Roseanne notably) but now in common use. (I just heard it onEmmerdale Farm, where they probably think its dialect). I would almostprefer gated, deriving from Forties public school stories in Hotspur andWizard. Other current dislikes: Brits; for starters; sorted; and (when usedintransitively) hurting. Alan Bennett in London Review of Books, 4 Jan. 1996 Preface to the Third EditionHenry Watson Fowler1 (1858-1933) is a legendary figure and his Dictionary ofModern English Usage (MEU), first published in 1926, is one of the mostcelebrated reference books of the twentieth century. It was the work of aprivate scholar writing in virtual seclusion in the island of Guernsey; later,after the 1914-18 war, he lived mostly in the village of Hinton St George inSomerset. His background was typical of that of hundreds of middle-classyoung men of the second half of the Victorian period: educated at RugbySchool and Balliol College, Oxford (where he read Classics), he went on tospend seventeen years (1882-99) teaching Classics and English at SedberghSchool in north-west Yorkshire (now Cumbria). There followed a four-yearperiod in London as a freelance essayist, after which he joined his youngerbrother, Francis George Fowler, in Guernsey in 1903. In two separate granitecottages, fifty yards apart, the brothers embarked on and completed threeambitious projects. First, they translated the Greek works of Lucian ofSamosata (1905); they then wrote The Kings English (1906), the precursor ofMEU, and compiled The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911). After an adventurousinterlude in the army in France in 1915-16, and after the death of his brotherin 1918, Fowler finished the Pocket Oxford Dictionary in 1924, and MEU in 1926,by which time he was 68. What I want to stress is the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of thelinguistic scholarship of his day, and his heavy dependence on school-masterly textbooks in which the rules of grammar, rhetoric, punctuation,spelling, and so on, were set down in a quite basic manner. For him, theancient Greek and Latin classics (including the metrical conventions of thepoets), the best-known works of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Englishliterature, and the language used in them formed part of a three-colouredflag. This linguistic flag was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as poss ...