Monumental achievement

That Fowler has now been brought out in a revised third edition should be a matter of satisfaction to people all over the world, especially to those who have not studied the English language in the way made mandatory since the 1960s. T.G. VAIDYANATHAN writes.

THE former Prime Minister of England, Sir Winston Churchill, was extremely fastidious in his use of the English language. Little wonder he won the Nobel for literature in 1953! In a minute to the Director of Military Intelligence on the March 19, 1944 (The Second World War, V, p.615) about the plans for the invasion of Normandy, he thundered "Why must you write intensive here? Intense is the right word. You should read Fowler's Modern English Usage on the use of the two words." The controversy over the use of these words (used interchangeably, as it were, by some people) was started by Fowler himself in the first edition of Modern English Usage in 1926. He was bothered that intensive was replacing intense to mean approximately 'highly concentrated'. He laid the blame for this change on two phrases that began to gain currency around the time of World War I: intensive farming and intensive bombardment. Nearly 75 years later, the words have tended to differentiate along different lines from those Fowler was defending.

In fact, the direction the English language has taken since 1926 would certainly not have pleased Henry Watson Fowler at all! He was the eldest son of the Revd Robert Fowler, a 'Military Tutor' at Tonbridge School in Kent in the middle of the 19th Century. Born on March 10, 1858, H.W. Fowler was educated at Rugby School and went up to Balliol College, Oxford where his contemporaries included men such as Arnold Toynbee, the historian, and Lord Curzon (who later became Viceroy of India). He failed to get a first in either Mods. or Greats, and taught briefly at Fettes School in Scotland before moving to Sedberg School in north-west Yorkshire in 1882 where he spent 17 years until 1889. The years at Sedberg School were HWF's great formative period. Spurred on by the school's motto Dura Virum Nutrix ('Hardy Nurse of Men'), he applied himself diligently to the teaching of classics and of English literature. HWF's decision to leave Sedberg arose from a point of principle. A difference of opinion with his headmaster, H.G. Hart-- Fowler, never a professing Christian, could not conscientiously undertake to prepare the boys for ordination - resulted in his being passed over for housemastership. So, at the age of 41, Fowler resigned and moved to London where he tried his hand as an essayist without enjoying any great success. After more tribulations - he enlisted as a private when he was 44 (he was actually 54 at that time!) - but fainted on parade and, after some weeks in a London hospital, was eventually discharged from the Army.

In 1925, Henry and his wife, Jessie - they were married on March 10, 1908 when Henry was 50 and she was four years younger at 46 - went to live in a cottage in the Somersetshire village of Hinton St. George where he remained until his death in 1933. During this period, he was chiefly occupied with lexicographical work for his publishers, Clarendon Press, and on the book - Modern English Usage - which was to make him a legend in his own lifetime. It pleased him to live a life of the utmost austerity while labouring on his masterpiece: he even declined the services of a servant whose wages his publishers offered to pay. Mind you, he was 68 then and winter was round the corner. His letter to the Secretary of the Press makes interesting reading: "And now you seem to say: Let us give you a servant, and the means of slow suicide and quick lexicography. Not if I know it: I must go my slow way" (cited in Sir Ernest Gowers' "Preface to the Revised Edition," p.xiii). Gowers' comment in this letter reveals his own admiration for Fowler: "So he continued to diversify his lexicography with the duties of a house-parlourmaid and no doubt performed them more scrupulously than any professional" (Ibid).

Modern English Usage remains a monumental achievement in the English language. Even its brave successor, the New Zealander Eric Partridge's Usage And Abusage (first published in 1943 in the United States. and reprinted by Penguin in England umpteen times), invites comparison with Fowler but does not survive it. It strives manfully for a certain lightness of tone in accordance with Partridge's declared aim in his 'Foreword' "not to compete with H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage ... and yet to write a book that should be less Olympian and less austere." He certainly tries hard to be "less Olympian" with his very first entry on the indefinite article a/an where one of his supporting citations is from Dorothy L. Sayers. And although there are several more from well-known English detective fiction writers in the 380 pages of text that follow - Ellery Queen, Freeman Wills Crofts and, of course, the ubiquitous Agatha Christie - Partridge only manages "a shoulder-beating book of great severity" according to Burchfield (Unlocking The English Language [1989], p.71). The well-known Oxford historian, A.J.P. Taylor, has singled out Modern English Usage as "perhaps the greatest work ever published by the Oxford University Press." On the other hand, Prof. Randolph Quirk, surely the most distinguished of modern grammarians, thought Henry Fowler "no great grammarian, still less a linguist in the modern scientific sense." Quirk's chief complaint against Fowler was that he relied far too much on literary evidence for spoken English and "his (Fowler's) belief that it was feasible to change pronoun usage by some kind of intellectual agreement arrived at between the speakers of English" (Robert Burchfield, Unlocking The English Language [Faber and Faber, 1989], p.142).

That Fowler has now been brought out in a new revised third edition in 1996 (under the expert eye of Burchfield himself) should be a matter of great satisfaction to people all over the world (where English is spoken widely), especially to those who have not studied the language in the way made mandatory since the 60s after the appearance of Chomsky's transformational grammar. Here a strong rearguard of scholars are apparently still at work as to why the sentence 'John is eager to please' is different from 'John is easy to please' (incidently, the most famous pair of sentences of Chomsky's school) because the "surface structure" and the "deep structure" (both Chomskian terms) of 'John is eager to please' are really identical but in the case of 'John is easy to please' the "surface structure" is quite different from the 'deep structure,' "To please John is easy" or "For us to please John is easy", and it requires a long sequence of operations to transform its deep structure into its surface structure. See Ved Mehta's informal, but completely fascinating, essay on the Battle of the Grammarians in his John Is Easy To Please (Penguin, 1974), pp.137-87). If "John is easy to please" figures most famously in Chomsky's Language and Mind (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1972), he (John) is clearly less easy to please in Chomsky's next book Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (published the same year by Mouton) where he figures in a series of bizarre states of mind from which I quote just two: a) 'It is a homicidal MANIAC that John is believed to be'; b) 'It is INCOMPETENT that John is believed to be.' See Ian Robinson's wickedly funny The New Grammarians' Funeral (Cambridge University Press, 1975).

The New Zealand-born, Robert Burchfield, was Chief Editor of the Oxford Dictionaries (1971-84) besides being Editor of the Four Supplements to the Oxford English Dictionary between 1975-86. He is easily the most distinguished and best-known lexicographer in the English-speaking world today. Burchfield is no descriptivist but a historical pragmatist, a relativist who "prefers an historical approach to English usage to one that is limitedly descriptive." Consequently, there are no ornately branching "tree diagrams, no epistemic modality... no generative grammar. The indefinite article a/an is called the indefinite article, not a central determiner..." ("Preface to the Third Edition," p.xi).

Yet Burchfield is not entirely sympathetic to Fowler either. The third edition of Modern English Usage which he has engineered is a frankly "revisionist estimate" of Fowler. Consider his treatment of Fowler's admonition (in both The King's English (1906) and Modern English Usage (1926) to users of "mutual friend" ("Everyone knows by now that our mutual friend is a solecism," The King's English, (p.65); "mutual friend is a well- known trap" we read in Modern English Usage (1926) and Burchfield points out in The New Fowler that the other sense of mutual, namely "pertaining to both parties, common" has been in unbroken use since the late 16c (Shakespeare), and that the phrase "our mutual friend" first appeared in 1658 long before Dickens's novel of that name" (Burchfield, p.509).

The English language, today, has indeed turned into a virtual battlefield of contending and contentious field of lexicographers, grammarians and linguists who have not arrived (and, indeed, seem far from arriving) at the articulation of their differences. Fowler, for instance, has no entry for "sentences adverbs," although by the late 1960s this has been "one of the most bitterly contested linguistic battles fought out in the last decades of the 20 c" (Burchfield, p.702). In fact, "there has been a swift and immoderate increase in the currency of -ly adverbs used to qualify a predication or assertion as a whole" such as actually, basically, frankly, regretfully, strictly and thankfully (Ibid). Yet, "round about the end of the 1960s, and with unprecedented venom, a dunce's cap was placed on the head of anyone who used just one of them - hopefully - as a sentence adverb" (Ibid), observes Burchfield with some asperity.

Many entries that would not have passed Fowler's schoolmasterly scrutiny have now been allowed admission here. That "veteran outcast," ain't - whose claims to legitimacy Burchfield pleads - "like a left-wing lawyer" in the words of John Updike whose wonderfully balanced review of The New Fowler, 'Fine Points', is included in his recent collection More Matter (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1999) - has, at long last, been allowed inside Fowler's sanctum sanctorum. Even the extremely liberal Webster's Third New International (1961) - with its formidable database of 4,500,000 new citations in addition to the 1,665,000 citations on its files already from previous editions, published at a staggering cost in 1961 of over $ 3,500,000! - finally baulked at the dubious credentials of ain't after seeming to grant it respectability by admitting that it was used "orally in most parts of the United States by many cultivated speakers especially in the phrase ain'tI" (Ibid, p.45). This caused an unprecented uproar. Reviewers felt Webster's Third New International had bestowed respectability on ain't and its inclusion was cited as "a particularly glaring example of the Dictionary's indiscretion" (Howard Jackson, Words And Their Meaning [Longman: London and New York, 1988], p.123). John Simon described Webster's Third as that "seminally sinister dictionary" (Paradigms Lost, Clarkson N. Potter: New York, (1980), p.xv). And Dwight Macdonald, in his magisterial critique, "The String Untuned", declared that the "permissive approach of the Structural Linguists... impoverishes the language by not objecting to errors if they are common enough" (Against The American Grain [Random House: New York, 1962], p.305). So disgusted was the New York Times with the new dictionary that it announced it would not use it but would continue with the 1934 edition! But the animus against ain't hasn't died down yet! Some thirty years back, we find a James H. Stedd thundering against its usage: "...any red-blooded American would prefer incest to Ain't" (cited by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., PADS, April '67). However, Burchfield, after ruefully noting that no one admits ain't "to the sacred unqualified ranks of standard English" proceeds to do just that! Bravo Burchfield! But I wonder why he doesn't cite that choice Churchillism (cited, surprisingly, in Webster's Dictionary Of English Usage (Merriam- Webster Inc.: Mass, 1989), p.64) where the former British Prime Minister is said to have remarked of the portrait of him seated wearing that characteristic bow tie that it makes him "look half- witted, which I ain't."

I need must spend some time dealing with the superstition that one should not end a sentence with a preposition (the Fowler brothers in their vastly entertaining The King's English (1906) regarded this as a modern superstition and cite from Genesis xxiii, 15 to show that ending with a preposition goes back to the Old Testament). This "modern superstition" irked the Fowler- loving Churchill, too, who once made this marginal comment against a sentence that clumsily avoided a prepositional ending: "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." There were other lesser known dissenters - both examples are taken from Sir Ernest Gowers' The Complete Plain Words (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1954), p.140) - like the young English nurse who in asking her charge, "What did you chose that book to be read to out of for?" managed to slip in four prepositions at the end of a sentence! The current world record for preposition-piling at the end is presumably held by that intrepid American poet, Morris Bishop, who wrote in the

New Yorker (September 27, 1947):

I lately lost a preposition;

It hid, I thought, beneath my chair

And angrily I cried,

"Perdition!

Up from out of in under there."

Correctness is my vade mecum,

And straggling phrases I abhor,

And yet I wondered, "What should he come

Up from out of in under for?"

Which brings me to that bugbear of modern usage - the vexed question of the 'split infinitive' which all too frequently occurs when an adverb or adverbial phrase is placed between the particle or sign to and the infinitive it governs. The first major grammarian to oppose the use of the split infinitive was Henry Alford in his usage manual The Queen's English (George Bell & Co., 1864). By 1926, the mood among the experts had changed and we find H. W. Fowler in his Dictionary Of Modern English Usage - the summa of usage after 1926 - defending the "real split infinitive" ("Is there then, 'an unreal split infinitive'?" asks the wily Eric Partridge in his Usage And Abusage) finding it "preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, & to patent artificiality" (Ibid, p.560). But the ayatollah-like conservatives of usage still held their ground! As recently as the early 1980s, the British Conservative politician, Jack Bruce- Gardyne, who was Economic Secretary to the Treasury in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive! But nearly all modern British authorities - Fowler, Gowers, Partridge - argue that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Jesperson has, in fact, argued that, strictly speaking, it isn't actually possible to split an infinitive! According to him," 'To' ... is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative" (Otto Jesperson, Growth and Structure of the English Language [Doubleday: New York, 1956], p.222).

The 'Indian contribution' to the English language was hitherto largely ignored where it was not the subject of wry English jokes. It was painful enough to read in an Encounter article in 1967 Antony Burgess making fun of the "English as spoken by the Tamils of India" as having "drifted further from metropolitan English than the language of either Milwaukee or Alice Springs, but nobody hails the emergence of a new tongue; one is inclined rather to talk disparagingly of a perverted English." Consider this tongue-resolutely-in-cheek anecdote from Sir Ernest Gowers' "Prologue" (sic) to The Complete Plain Words: "I recall an old story of an Indian official who on finding his British superior laboriously correcting a letter he had drafted to a brother Indian official, remarked: 'Your honour puts yourself to much trouble correcting my English and doubtless the final letter will be much better literature; but it will go from me Mukherji to him Banerji, and he Banerji will understand it a great deal better as I Mukherji write it than as your Honour corrects.' '' Things have improved considerably since then and examples of contemporary Indian usage fairly abound in the Burchfield-Fowler. Still I must say I was surprised to read under the word ranee (surely a British spelling in 19th Century India, in the high noon of the Raj): "Still perhaps the more usual spelling (rather than rani) for the word meaning "the wife of a raja" when, even by 1984, R. E. Hawkins, in his Common Indian Words in English (Oxford University Press), had spelt the wife or widow of a maharaja as maharani. Under maharaja, Burchfield writes: "(hist.), an Indian prince, not -jah. With capital initial when used as a title. The wife of a maharaja was a maharanee." Even Homer - as the saying goes - nods!

And, finally, whatever strictures Burchfield passes on the old Fowler, it is that doughty Englishman's "flinty idealism that endeared him to the generations of those who came to consult and stayed to read with real pleasure, his tireless compilations of slovenly English and his relentlessly logical parsing." This is indeed true. Even Sir Ernest Gowers who was responsible for bringing out the second edition of Modern English Usage, more than 30 years after Fowler's death, concedes that Fowler was "mathematical rather than literary." His fulminations against the notorious "fused participle" - "Yet every just man who will abstain from the fused participle... retards the progress of corruption" - are now a matter of history. Fowler fought a losing battle over this with the great grammarian, Otto Jesperson, who came back at Fowler with a volley of quotations from literature from Swift to Shaw. He characterised Fowler's position as "a typical specimen of what I call the instinctive grammatical moraliser" (Burchfield, p.609) and blamed him "for believing in the validity of Latin parallels." But, Burchfield adds thoughtfully, at the end of his entry on "possessive with gerund," "The possessive with gerund is on the retreat..." (Ibid, p.610).

The English language - like the unwritten English Constitution - is full of idiosyncracies and willfulness but is ever changing. As far back as 1905, Otto Jesperson was praising English for its lack of rigidity, its happy air of casualness. Likening French - which has its Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal Richelieu way back in 1635 - to the severe and formal gardens of Louis XIV, he contrasted it with English which he said was "laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations" (Growth and Structure of the English Language, (p.16). It certainly seems only yesterday when the controversy over "shall" and "will" died down. Even the "plain future" rule (shall in the first person; will in the second and third) recommended by numerous textbooks of grammar no longer seems applicable if it ever was. (Only an ingenious philosopher like the American, Wilfrid Sellars, has managed to scrupulously observe the shall-will distinction while appearing to violate it when he writes in his Science And Metaphysics (1968): "I am reconstructing English usage pertaining to "shall" in such a way that, in candid speech, it always expresses an intention on the part of the speaker... In other words I shall use "shall" and "will" in such a way that "shall" always expresses an intention, whereas "will" is always a simple future."). For instance, the idiom of the Celts was always different. They never recognised shall. Let Ernest Gowers do the talking: "For them 'I will go' is the plain future. The story is a very old one of the drowning Scot who was misunderstood by English onlookers and left to his fate because he cried, 'I will drown and nobody shall save me' " (The Complete Plain Words, pp.161-62).

The good news is that fewer Scots - and one thinks at once of the redoubtable Sir Sean Connery - especially in his deathless Bond films - are perishing these days merely because of a misuse of "shall" and "will"!

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