Tag Archives: fowler

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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Fowler narratives?

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Ingrid Tieken

Next year, 2026, will be a Fowler year, just like this year is a Jane Austen year. In Henry Fowler‘s case, 100 years after the publication of his phenomenal Modern English Usage. So I’m looking for Fowler narratives, stories about … Continue reading →

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Who uses Fowler?

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Ingrid Tieken

For a presentation next week, I’d like to have some preliminary data about my research question in the heading of this post. Do you use Fowler’s Modern English Usage? So here come some specific questions: If you use Fower, what … Continue reading →

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Linguistic Landscaping in Bookshops (3)

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Ingrid Tieken

I had to be in Leiden for a social event this week, so decided to go a little earlier and visit as many of the bookshops in the city centre as I could manage. Three of them this time, all … Continue reading →

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Usage guides… there’s no getting away from them!

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Robin Straaijer

Yesterday, I found this well-worn copy of Margaret Nicholson’s A Dictionary of American-English Usage (Signet 1958) in my local street library (see photo below) just around the corner of where I live. I realised that it has been just about … Continue reading →

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Guess what?! You don’t just speak a dialect; you’re also illiterate and uneducated!

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is Ilse Stolte’s second blogpost, on a topic related to the first one she wrote about: For the course on Non-Standard English and prescriptivism, I spend a great deal of time reading through entries of usage guides in … Continue reading →

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Dahlesque got in, so how about Fowleresque?

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Two weeks ago, NRC-Handelsblad published an article on the memorable fact that among their new entries, the Oxford English Dictionary adopted words made up by Roald Dahl (1916-1990). The OED as a news item in a Dutch quality newspaper! The occasion appears … Continue reading →

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Fowler’s Modern English Usage: new but not New

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Robin Straaijer

It was February 1997, and Robert Burchfield’s The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage had been out for three months. Just as the 1st and 2nd editions of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage came to be known as ‘Fowler’, The Economist asked itself whether the … Continue reading →

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A vintage copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

I always thought this is what the COD looked like: Until yesterday, when I found a lovely, what might be described as a vintage copy of the book on the Free Books Table we have on the second floor of … Continue reading →

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Bennett’s Wordfinder

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

This is an index to the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, based on the version revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (1965). Paul Bennett has written elsewhere on this blog, about Fowler’s humour. Why need an index to a work that … Continue reading →

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