Tag Archives: Bryan Garner

Garner on Fowler

Posted on October 14, 2025 by Ingrid Tieken

Next year is a Fowler year. The Fowler year, when we will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of his Modern English Usage. We’re definitely looking forward to it! Anticipating 2026 in this light, Bryan Garner, author of OUP’s well-known Garner’s … Continue reading →

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English Language Day 2016

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Today is English Language Day, and yesterday we had a wondeful sneak preview of it with Harry Ritchie’s talk Ashamed of your English?, followed by more talk on English prescriptivism during lunch afterwards. Last year’s post to commemorate the day … Continue reading →

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Drownded: read drowned

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Perhaps the most interesting irregular verb form I found in my analyse of the usage guides in HUGE (for a paper I’m giving next week on the topic) is drownded. The only usage guide in the HUGE database that mentions … Continue reading →

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How many English usage guides are there?

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

This is an important question in the context of this project, but it will be one that I have come to decide is impossible to answer. Unfortunately, and (perhaps, for some) frustratingly so. One important tool (or so I thought originally) … Continue reading →

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Question for Bryan Garner

Posted on June 2, 2015 by BtU Admin

Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage contains a lengthy list of works dealing with English usage, studies as well as usage guides. Very useful for our project! There is one item which I can’t quite classify offhand as belonging to either … Continue reading →

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HUGE database

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Robin Straaijer

The creation of a database of English usage guides and usage problems: the Hyper Usage Guide of English, or HUGE-database, is one of the sub-projects within Bridging the Unbridgeable. It is the first database to combine more than two hundred years of usage advice … Continue reading →

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Tape your ducks in a row!

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Robin Straaijer

Sometimes you’ll find interesting explanations about why specific usages are problematic. This one caught my eye recently. It’s from the entry for duct tape in Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Garner quotes a newspaper articles to explain why people … Continue reading →

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Features

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Robin Straaijer

We have added a new page to the blog; it’s called Features. While our blog posts are usually short and to the point, we occasionally want to post longer pieces. These features can take different formats: they can be a … Continue reading →

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Discussing correctness with Bryan A. Garner

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Ingrid Tieken

Matthijs Smits sent us a link containing a discussion in the New York Times Online between American usage expert Bryan Garner and Economist journalist Robert Greene. The interview deals with the usual descriptivism/prescriptivism question, and by way of an illustration … Continue reading →

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On snuck and sneaked

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Ingrid Tieken

Mesthrie et al. write on p. 23 of their book Introducing Sociolinguistics (2nd ed., 2009, Edinburgh University Press, that different verb forms are regarded as standard in the UK than in the US. One example they is give is snuck/sneaked, … Continue reading →

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