Dictionary of Modern English Usage / H.W. Fowler

As a reference book on the use of the English language, "Fowler's" is by far the liveliest and most readable. In the long tradition of the English writing about their English, the best have consistently been those who were not timid in their opinion of what was good and what was bad writing; I think of Dr Johnson and Orwell, and of course Fowler.

The Oxford University Press is now reissuing the first edition, which we might want to call the Original of Fowler. The second, as that review notes, was lightly edited by Ernest Gowers, a career civil servant whose own tome, Plain Words is perhaps the British mandarin's equivalent of Strunk and White. The most recent edition of Modern English Usage, however, is a massively inflated book. The original could sit nicely in your hand on the bus. The newer book would prefer a desk. It confirmed what I feared when I leafed through it for the first time: bloodlessness, prevarication, and a particularly academic strain of frustrating equanimity. It is not a book that you would read for pleasure, while the older edition (I own the second) certainly was.

When I was in the army I sometimes read it in barracks on free evenings; once my bunkmate asked if I was reading the Bible - no, I said, I'm reading a dictionary, and got a funny look from him. What made it so riveting, I think, were the idiosyncratic (yet sound) entries and their occasionally oblique headings ("Out of the frying pan..." headed an entry on common errors), and the cross-references from one entertaining miniature essay to another, a strikingly prescient forerunner of serial-Wikipedia-procrastination.

A reactionary might say, in the face of news like the British Local Government Agency issuing a list of jargon and meaningless words for bureaucrats to avoid, that "we need a Fowler now more than ever", and other platitudes of that kind. Maybe so, but far worse than the purely unaesthetic qualities of bad writing, a reliance on cliche and faddish buzzwords has a more sinister aspect. In Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann, she noted how he seemed to fix on using certain catchwords or stock phrases that he favored. In our modern world, we might say that he settled into them like how a corporate-type might settle into "synergies" or "paradigms", or how the military likes clunky acronyms that it then repurposes to all parts of speech. Perhaps the banality of evil, then, grows best upon a banality of mind, and the best fertilizer for such minds is a soulless, thoughtless, and unfeeling bureaucratic banality of speech.