Pretentiousness & Pedantry

"Whoever writes English," Novelist George Orwell once said, is struggling constantly "against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective...and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up." But as Orwell well knew, there is one sure source of comfort and aid: all a writer has to do is to turn to the late Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage.

A cross between dictionary, stylebook and guide to good taste in writing, Fowler's* has become, since 1926, the final arbiter for hundreds of thousands of readers interested in the correct use of English words and phrases. It has run through three printings in the U.S., 14 in the British Commonwealth. Last week the Oxford University Press announced that it is now well into its second halfmillion. Total copies sold to date: 507,000.

Overworked Arm. Such success would probably have amazed Lexicographer Fowler. He was a fussy, solitary man who at 41 retired from schoolmastering with the solemn announcement: "My dear fellow, I'm not going to do anything useful again." In his Guernsey cottage he pottered away at his writing, emerged only now & then to take a brisk walk for his health. He hated to let in visitors (he preferred to talk to them out in the road), and his news of the outside world came mainly from the chitchat of his wife. Nevertheless, Fowler knew how his countrymen spoke and wrote, and for the most part, he heartily disapproved.

His main targets were pretentiousness and pedantry; he hated cliches, mannerisms, and manglings of every sort. "The witty gentleman who equipped coincidence with her long arm," he wrote in his essay on Hackneyed Phrases, "has doubtless suffered even in this life at seeing that arm so mercilessly overworked." This, of course, was also true of the gentlemen who first invented sleep the sleep of the just, conspicuous by his absence, more sinned against than sinning, the irony of fate, the tender mercies of, and at the parting of the ways.

Dressed-Up Words. Formal words were another of Fowler's peeves. "We tell our thoughts, like our children, to put on their hats & coats before they go out: we want the window shut, but we ask if our fellow passenger would mind its being closed...There is nothing to be ashamed of in buy or jam or say that they should need translating into purchase & preserve & remark." Other dressed-up words to be avoided: bear for carry, cease for stop, commence for begin, don for put on.

There are also Illiteracies (rather unique, more preferable), Long Variants (administrate for administer, assertative for assertive, dampen for damp, wastage for waste), Pairs & Snares (advance and advancement, compose and comprise, fortuitous and fortunate, purport and purpose). But these are only the beginning of Fowler's warnings. Among others:

P: Periphrasis--"The putting of things in a roundabout way. In Paris there reigns a complete absence of really reliable news is a periphrasis for There is no reliable news in Paris...The answer is in the negative is a periphrasis for No."

P: Genteelism--"The substituting, for the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd...The truly genteel...invite one to step, not come, this way; take in not lodgers, but paying guests;... keep stomachs and domestics instead of bellies and servants; and have quite forgotten that they could ever have been guilty of toothpowder and napkins and underclothing, of before and except and about, where nothing now will do for them but dentifrice, serviette, lingerie, ere, save, anent."

P: Superiority--"The various apologies (if we may adopt the current slang...as the streetboys have it...in the vernacular phrase) to which recourse is had by writers who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled."

Such good advice once prompted Punch to say:

0 all ye young writers...

Don't heed the mere growler

Who grunts and despairs,

But turn to the Fowler

Who saves you from snares.

* Modern English Usage is a worthy companion if no blood kin to the great Oxford English Dictionary.

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