Modern English abusage

When Henry Watson Fowler published his Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926 he could hardly have foreseen how popular it would become as a source of information about grammar, rhetoric, punctuation, spelling, and other matters related to written and spoken English. The first edition, reprinted many times, was followed by a second, edited by Ernest Gowers in 1965, and a third, edited by Robert Burchfield in 1996.

Apart from the fact that Burchfield chronicles the ways in which our use of language has changed since Fowler and Gowers, his edition differs in one major aspect—it is descriptive rather than prescriptive or proscriptive. Whereas his predecessors told us what we ought to do, Burchfield uses his large corpus of examples to tell us what we actually do. And although he often shows approval or disapproval, or states his own preferences, he generally yields to common usage, rather than to rigid rules, as the arbiter of correctness. For instance, Fowler preferred Britishism to Briticism, labelling the latter a barbarism; Burchfield simply comments that Briticism is now the more usual term in scholarly work. Of course, Fowler and Gowers are not always rigid, nor Burchfield always permissive, but the emphasis has changed.

Burchfield's text is as authoritative as Fowler's was. But his New Fowler is marred by a poor grasp of medicine and science. Take some examples. “Vaccinate,” he writes, “is technically synonymous with inoculate, but in practice tends to be restricted to mean inoculate [against] smallpox.” He has it the wrong way round: vaccinate technically (or at least etymologically) means to inoculate against smallpox using cowpox, but is nowadays used to mean to inoculate against any infectious disease.

Elsewhere Burchfield correctly writes that in an arithmetical progression—for example,1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc—the rate of increase is much smaller than in a geometrical progression—for example, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. But he then says that sometimes a geometrical progression can be used to indicate a slow rate of increase—0.00001, 0.00002, 0.00004, 0.00008, etc. To be fair to Burchfield, he has made a valiant attempt to simplify the corresponding entry by Fowler, which is hard to fathom. But he perpetuates Fowler's mistake, in failing to appreciate that these two geometrical progressions grow at exactly the same rate, presumably misled by the smallness of the absolute increments in the latter.

Burchfield's description of a calorie is oversimplified and he makes no mention of the joule. Caucasian he describes as the normal word for a white person “in American English (but rarely elsewhere),” ignoring its widespread use in the world scientific literature. He defines the centigrade scale as one in which water freezes at 32° and boils at 212°; Celsius he defines correctly, Fahrenheit he omits (although he defines it under Celsius), and Réaumur he includes simply to note its pronunciation. And groin, he says, is “a physiological term.”

But Burchfield's most curious solecism is in his explanation of the medical titles Mr and Dr. “In Britain,” he writes “a surgeon is normally addressed as Mr + surname, but in Scotland Dr is used for both physicians and surgeons.” Having read this I thought that Burchfield must have uncritically copied Fowler and Gowers, but in fact neither of them made this assertion—it is Burchfield's alone, and I don't think that it was ever true. But perhaps he knows something about the intentions of the Scottish Assembly that the rest of us do not.