Tag Archives: fowler

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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Are Americanisms taking over the British Language?

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Below follows Jan van den Berg’s first blogpost: “American influence is busily eroding a valuable and once firm distinction in British speech and writing” (Amis 1997: 11). This is a quotation from Kingsley Amis’s usage guide The King’s English (1997). As we … Continue reading →

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Maar is het fout? (But is it wrong?)

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Annemarie Walop‘s second blog post. While browsing on the internet a few weeks ago, I found a very interesting article on the website of Dutch quality newspaper De Volkskrant about the Dutch coordinating conjunction maar (“but”). The article is … Continue reading →

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Effect an effect

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Kate Taylor’s first blogpost (Kate is another of my MA course Testing Prescriptivism students). In my experience there are three levels of knowledge regarding the uses of the words effect and affect: imagine these three levels as the tiers … Continue reading →

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Hodge and Byron F. Caws

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

Walking along Fleet Street in London last week, we sidetracked a little to have a look at Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square. The first thing you see when entering the square is a statue of Johnson’s cat, Hodge. But … Continue reading →

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