saxonisms

I see the Oxford University Press has finally concluded that the educated public will never be browbeaten into accepting the New Coke version of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and has decided to give us back Fowler Classic. Can it really be 13 years since Burchfield’s namby-pamby descriptivist Fowler came out? I still remember the day a friend phoned me on a slow day at work, and when she asked what I was up to, I mentioned that I had just read John Simon’s New Criterion review of the Burchfield—the harshest of many reviews I’d already read, but not the most troubling. (In matters such as these, it’s the positive reviews that give the game away.) I must have raged for 20 more minutes about the inherent illogic of putting a soggy, slack, no-rules, whatever-works-even-if-it-doesn’t type in charge of a usage guide, especially Fowler’s. I later found out that she had already bought me the “new Fowler” in hardcover for Christmas and had to race back to the store to return it. Life imitates O Henry.