Henry Watson Fowler and Modern English Usage
The recovery of Victorian values, such as thrift and self-reliance, has repeatedly been espoused by British politicians, notably Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. But, as I have suggested, those values have never really needed recovering, because they have never gone away. They have survived in the daily lives of men and women who, unlike Rachel Vinrace, have found nothing delightful in the incoherence of modernity.
One of the most influential of these has been Henry Watson Fowler, described by his obituarist in The Times as ‘a lexicographical genius’ possessed of ‘a crispness, a facility, and an unexpectedness which have not been equalled’.1 Small, energetic and eccentric, Fowler was a schoolmaster for two decades before he chose a second career as a freelance writer, and he was close to fifty by the time he published The King’s English in 1906. Fowler originally proposed as its title ‘The New Solecist for Literary Tiros’, and the finished volume – on which he collaborated with his brother Francis, usually known as Frank and a keen grower of tomatoes – is stocked with examples of ‘conspicuous’ solecisms, which serve as illustrations of ‘how not to write’. Many of the blunders were culled from newspapers, and many from Victorian novels (Marie Corelli gets a hard time over her affection for ugly adverbs such as ‘vexedly’ and ‘bewilderedly’, Thackeray for mixing up ‘which’ and ‘that’). The Fowlers were not men to mince their words. ‘There are certain American verbs,’ they stated, ‘that remind Englishmen of the barbaric taste illustrated by such town names as Memphis’. They argued that ‘a very firm stand ought to be made against placate, transpire, and antagonize, all of which have English patrons’. Quite what the Fowlers had against Memphis is not recorded. But they are keen on strong pronouncements. Recognizing that fall is more vivid than autumn, they comment, ‘we once had as good a right to it as the Americans; but we have chosen to let the right lapse, and to use the word now is no better than larceny.’
The most celebrated statement of the Fowler brothers’ vision occurs on the book’s first page, where ‘general principles’ for the good writer are succinctly set down. One should aim always ‘to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid’, and this principle ‘may be translated into practical rules’: one must prefer ‘the familiar word to the far-fetched’, ‘the concrete word to the abstract’, ‘the single word to the circumlocution’, ‘the short word to the long’, and ‘the Saxon word to the Romance’. It is significant that the Fowlers call these ‘practical rules’.
Although The King’s English sold quite briskly, and the brothers together produced The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the reputation of Henry Fowler is far greater than that of Frank, and rests on A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which he wrote alone. Published in 1926, it sold 60,000 copies in its first year. In time it came to be known simply as ‘Fowler’, and for more than half a century it influenced British ideas of English usage more than any other book. It continues to have plenty of admirers.
At a time when scholars of language were embracing the descriptive method of lexicography, Fowler was prescriptive. Yet although A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was backward-looking when it came out – certainly not ‘modern’ – it was not revised until the 1960s. We can gauge its temper from the fact that Fowler at one time wanted to call it ‘Oxford Pedantics’. Devising titles was not one of his strengths. But while some parts of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage possess an air of both Oxonian grandeur and sub-molecular pedantry, others manifest a striking reasonableness. He is much more flexible in his thinking than many of his admirers have seemed to imagine. For instance, he says it is acceptable to use whose of inanimate objects – ‘These are designs whose merits I appreciate’, instead of ‘These are designs the merits of which I appreciate’. Many would demur, but Fowler enjoyably comments that ‘good writing is surely difficult enough without the forbidding of things that have historical grammar, & present intelligibility, & obvious convenience, on their side, & lack only – starch.’2 We may smile at his aversion to parlous (‘a word that wise men leave alone’) and at his informing us that dialogue is ‘neither necessarily, nor necessarily not, the talk of two persons’, but we are more likely to nod in agreement when he describes as ‘pompous ornaments’ the words beverage and emporium, suggests that the pronunciation of hotel with a silent h ‘is certainly doomed, & is not worth fighting for’, observes that ‘shortness is a merit in words’ and ‘extra syllables reduce, not increase, vigour’, and insists that when we say sausage roll the emphasis should be on roll.3 His affection for the ampersand (&) seems, in contrast, oddly fetishistic.
One of Fowler’s better-known judgements concerns split infinitives: ‘The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know & distinguish.’ The second group, with whom you may be painfully familiar, are guilty of ‘tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinion of others’ and ‘subject their sentences to the queerest distortions’ to escape split infinitives. Characteristically, Fowler finds a really ‘deafening’ split infinitive with which to appal us: ‘Its main idea is to historically, even while events are maturing, & divinely – from the Divine point of view – impeach the European system of Church & States.’ But he establishes, just a touch grandly, the principle that ‘We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial.’4
Fowler is not a systematic grammarian. Rather, he has good intuitions, and he examines his intuitions. His great concern is ‘idiom’ – ‘that is idiomatic which it is natural for a normal Englishman to say or write’. We can see problems here: what is ‘a normal Englishman’, for instance, and what are we to make of that almost throwaway ‘say or write’? Fowler’s impression of idiomatic usage appears to be based on statements extracted from a variety of nameless informants. One suspects they were not numerous. Fowler favoured the example of southern, male English-speakers, and it is clear that he trusted above all his own judgement. ‘What the wise man does,’ he writes, ‘is to recognize that the conversational usage of educated people in general … is the naturalizing authority.’5 ‘Educated people in general’ were a group he could not hope to canvass in much depth, but there was always one ‘wise man’ he could consult immediately.
Despite his moments of pomposity, and for all his carping about the wicked ways of sports journalists and children, Fowler has lasting appeal. Plenty of people have found it hard not to admire someone who can dismiss the use of frock rather than dress as a ‘nurseryism’, state without explanation that pixy is better than pixie, and say that salad days ‘is fitter for parrots’ than for human speech’.6 There’s a savviness, too, when he notes the habit of using inverted commas to apologize for slang.
A great deal of what Fowler advises has not been adopted: we do not say, as he proposed, flutist rather than flautist or contradictious rather than contradictory. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, many of his positions look like lost causes. Those who continue to revere him do so because they would like to climb inside Fowler’s little world. The idea of Fowler, even if not the reality of what he wrote, 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. All these are areas where a love of detail goes hand in hand with firmly held opinions. Even the seemingly innocent brewing of a hot drink can be a subject of passionate debate.
Among Americans, Fowler has wielded little influence. Instead the big beasts policing the jungle of usage have proved to be Strunk and White, two men whose names have been etched in the minds of several generations of American high-school students. The Elements of Style, originally conceived by William Strunk in 1918 as a pamphlet for distribution to students at Cornell Univers
ity, was expanded by his former student E. B. White – author of the delightful children’s book Charlotte’s Web – and published with his name alongside Strunk’s in 1959. The Elements of Style has many fans. It contains some unimpeachable advice (‘Be clear’, for instance), but a great deal of what it has to say looks quaint now. Is ‘six persons’ preferable to ‘six people’? Does the instruction ‘Use the active voice’ mean one should never use the passive? Are we really supposed to accept the imperative ‘Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs’, when it is followed by the claim that ‘The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place’ – a sentence that contains three adjectives?7 The Elements of Style has two obvious virtues: brevity and a low price. It has sold more than ten million copies, and has earned some astonishing tributes, the most unlikely of which include a ballet and a song cycle for tenor and soprano – accompanied by, among other things, a typewriter and a banjo. Its continued success owes much to a refusal to be modern; its simplicity seems reassuring although, as with so much that masquerades as simplicity, it is really a cover for imperiousness.
In American publishing, there has since 1906 been The Chicago Manual of Style. Currently its section on grammar is the work of Bryan Garner, a Texan lawyer who is also the author of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage and the founder of the H. W. Fowler Society. There are numerous other guides to usage, marketed by their publishers as presenting practical solutions to real problems and promoting confidence. But the irony of what I’ll call Fowler-love permeates the whole province of usage guides: the people who are most interested in books of this kind are those who need them least.
One of the strengths of Fowler, which makes him well worth revisiting, is his diagnosis of human conditions. In articles on subjects such as ‘pride of knowledge’, ‘worn-out humour’, ‘irrelevant allusion’ and ‘popularized technicalities’ he deals with matters no less common now than they were in 1926. One category that seems especially useful is ‘genteelism’, which he defines as ‘the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself … and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd’.8 The genteel do not speak of bad smells, but rather of unpleasant odours; and instead of being a lodger and going to bed, one is a paying guest and one retires. Expanding on Fowler, Eric Partridge in his book Usage and Abusage calls words of this kind ‘elegancies’. His list of examples includes ‘connubial rites’, ‘floral tribute’, ‘mine host’, impecunious, remuneration, bosom, nuptials, veritable and umbrage. These are ‘the “literary and cultured English” of those who, as a rule, are neither literary nor cultured’.9 Partridge’s book was published in 1947, and more than sixty years on most of these words are used ironically or playfully. But we recognize the nature of his targets. Fowler for his part stresses that it is wrong to think that words of this kind can never be used. However, their use should not in his view, or in Partridge’s, be automatic. That way lies tweeness.
The point about genteelism is that it indicates primness and snootiness rather than any real dignity of thought and character. This disparity between people’s reasons for using genteelisms and the reactions genteelism achieves was given memorable expression in the 1950s by Nancy Mitford. In 1954 Alan Ross, a professor at Birmingham University, wrote an article entitled ‘Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English’, which appeared in a Finnish scholarly journal. Mitford read it and quoted from it in a piece she wrote for the magazine Encounter. This and a simplified version of Ross’s original article were reprinted in Noblesse Oblige, a collection intended as ‘an enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy’. Noblesse Oblige demonstrates Mitford’s love of ‘teases’, and its mischievous statements ruffled the feathers of many readers. Ross’s contribution attracted particular interest, mainly because it distinguished in detail between ‘U’ (upper class) and ‘non-U’ practices. So, for instance, it is non-U when addressing an envelope to place the name of the house in inverted commas (‘The Old Rectory’, Little Slumberscombe), to sound the l in golf or in the name Ralph, and to speak of a serviette rather than a table napkin.
A central feature of the usage denigrated by Fowler, Partridge, Ross and Mitford is hyperurbanism, although they do not use this word. This is a form of hypercorrection – which is the name for a mistake made in the course of trying to avoid a mistake or something perceived to be one. Hypercorrection is a significant factor in language change; eventually the ‘wrong’ form used by someone striving for what he believes to be a prestige form is used so often that it becomes acceptable. The more specific phenomenon of hyperurbanism involves avoiding what is believed to be a ‘low’ mistake and using a supposedly classier word or pronunciation, although in fact the result is nothing of the sort. Examples include ‘between you and I’, the erroneous use of whom (‘Whom are you?’) and saying ‘haitch’ rather than ‘aitch’ because of a fear of dropping one’s hs.
‘Between you and I’ causes fits of indignation. It is condemned as an ignorant effort at elegance. When the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage was published in 1975, the experts consulted did not agree about much, but fell over one another to condemn this form of words. It was deemed unacceptable in written English by 98 per cent, and by 97 per cent in speech. W. H. Auden pronounced it ‘Horrible!’, Anthony Burgess quipped that it was okay ‘only when “Give it to I” is also used’, and the whimsical poet and legendary Harvard fund-raiser David McCord was moved to exclaim, ‘Flying catfish: NO!!!’10 The condemnation of ‘between you and I’ began in the nineteenth century. As we saw in the opening chapter, these words occur in The Merchant of Venice, and in seventeenth-century drama they appear in confidential exchanges, as when Lady Froth in Congreve’s The Double-Dealer says, ‘Between you and I, I had whimsies and vapours.’ Mark Twain wrote ‘between you and I’ in his letters. It’s hardly the new-fangled perversion that its critics believe.
One reason, I suspect, that people say ‘between you and I’ is the feeling that you and I belong together. This is not a subliminal message, but an observation about people’s use of ‘you and I’ as if it is not a pair of pronouns yoked by a conjunction, but a single indissoluble unit. You-and-I belong together, and if we’re together the world belongs to you-and-I. Additionally, many people are confused by the experience, early in life, of being corrected after making a statement such as ‘You and me are friends’. Being drilled to say ‘You and I are friends’ has the effect of cementing the attraction between you and I.
Reactions along the lines of ‘Horrible!’ explain why people feel anxious about their English. And while authors such as Fowler and Partridge may be of some use to those who are tormented by the possibility of making mistakes that might cause others to exclaim (or think) ‘Flying catfish’, there is a well-established market for more direct and pragmatic guides. In newspapers and magazines I have many times seen an advertisement that poses the question: ‘Shamed by your English?’ This is one of the more recent versions of an oft-repeated formula. Variants include ‘Stop Abusing the English Language’ and ‘Are YOU ever overheard making mistakes like these?’
For roughly half of the last century the leading advertiser in this field was Sherwin Cody. ‘What Are YOUR Mistakes in English?’ reads one of Cody’s sales pitches. ‘They may offend others as much as these offend you.’ The text promotes the Sherwin Cody School of English in Rochester, New York, and claims that Mr Cody, ‘perhaps the best known teacher of practical English’, has ‘patented a remarkable device which will quickly find and correct mistakes you unconsciously make’. Originally a journalist and poet, Cody was an advocate of self-improvement, the contemporary of other evangelists in this field such as Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie; his ‘remarkable device’ was a home-study course – somewhat disappointing, given that the words inspire thoughts of a tiny machine or prosthetic contraption – which consisted of weekly booklets that taug
ht ‘expression’ on Mondays, spelling on Tuesdays, punctuation on Wednesdays, grammar on Thursdays, and finally conversation on Fridays.
Cody’s approach is now intriguing mainly because of its homespun character. In his Monday lessons on expression he encouraged his students to rehearse the stories of their lives. By way of example he recounted his own story, ranging from ‘My Earliest Recollections – the Storms and Fires in Nebraska’ via ‘The Early Education of a Country Boy’ to ‘The Heaven and Hell of Love’. He also emphasized his own success.11 The result was pleasantly accessible, literary rather than technical – Cody followed nineteenth-century American writers such as Emerson in speaking of books as a means of self-education. But the way he presented his material was narrow; what he billed as the development of one’s mental life was to be achieved, apparently, in just fifteen minutes a day. His course contained little grammar and lots of examples, explicitly linking ownership of a toolkit full of nice phrases to professional and material advancement. The danger here was that mastery of language was made to seem like a box of tricks.
The writings of H. W. Fowler and Sherwin Cody are hugely different. But people have turned to them for broadly similar reasons. Anxieties about one’s English typically begin with being told that one has violated a particular rule – more likely a principle or a convention, though it will have been presented to us as rock-solid. In his book The Devil’s Dictionary, that bitingly cynical provocateur Ambrose Bierce defined grammar as ‘A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.’
A moment ago I broke what I in my schooldays was led to believe was just such a rule. I can remember being taught, when I was seven or eight years old, never to begin a sentence with And or But. I can also remember the same English teacher telling me that it was unacceptable for me to have called a character in a short story Jonathan. I was young and impressionable, and the rule about not opening sentences with And or But stuck with me for about a decade, when I began to violate it gleefully.
The Language Wars Page 23
