Category Archives: usage guide

Jeremy Clarkson on car journalists and “generic he”

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Inge Otto

Jeremy Clarkson, whom many of us might know from the British television show TopGear, in his column of October 2013 worries about things other than cars. Right. What could that be? you might think. Well, from the outside, most of … Continue reading →

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Mini-exhibition on Sir Ernest Gowers

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

There have been various posts in this blog on Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966), one of our major usage guide writers, so high time for a mini-exhibition showing some of our finds, as well as illustrating his legacy as the writer … Continue reading →

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Plain Words + ABC of Plain Words = Complete Plain Words

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

When in Cambridge, we always visit the Amnesty Bookshop in Mill Road, a treasure house of second-hand books. And I was lucky again today: I stumbled upon the two books that together came to be published as Sir Ernest Gowers’s The … Continue reading →

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You guys, you all and Kingsley Amis

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

When we were living in Cambridge, two years ago, I was struck by the pervasiveness of you guys as a plural pronoun. It is not as if it was new to me: in my history of the language lectures I … Continue reading →

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Hain’t

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Inge Otto

Have you ever heard anybody say hain’t?  Have you seen it written down somewhere for have not or has not? Until this morning I was totally unfamiliar with the expression. To be honest, I  only knew of the existence of … Continue reading →

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How funny are they?

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

One of the characteristics of English usage guides is that they often include tongue-in-cheek remarks, actual jokes or just plain witticisms. As the Fowler brothers wrote, when they were working on The King’s English, “we try to throw in a little elegant flippancy … Continue reading →

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Eenermost: a gross corruption?

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

In the one instance in which this word occurs in Jane Austen’s letters it doesn’t mean what the spelling appears to suggest (innermost?): he said the fleas were so starved when he came back from Chawton that they all flew … Continue reading →

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Back to school: buy Fowler

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

I was just forwarded an email from OUP USA which announces a Back to School 2013 offer of a 65% reduction on book prices. The list of books on offer include Fowler’s Modern English Usage, at half-price, which is good, … Continue reading →

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Edmund Weiner and English usage guides

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

We probably all know Edmund Weiner  as one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. But he is also the writer of a usage guide: The Oxford Guide to English Usage. The book first came out  in 1983, and … Continue reading →

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Who was Sir Ernest Gowers?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Carmen Ebner

While browsing in one of the many second hand bookshops in Scotland, I came across a familiar name: Sir Ernest Gowers. Gowers, known for his revision of H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, also published other reference works such as the … Continue reading →

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