English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes [Illustrated] 9780198808206

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English Usage Guides

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/10/2017, SPi

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English Usage Guides History, Advice, Attitudes

Edited by INGRID TIEKEN-BO O N VAN OSTA DE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford,  , United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Editorial matter and organization Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade  © The chapters their several authors  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in  Impression:  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press  Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon,   Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements The chapters in this collection were originally presented as papers at the English Usage (Guides) Symposium which was held in Cambridge on  and  June , and which Robin Straaijer and I organized together with Henriëtte Hendriks from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) from the University of Cambridge. The symposium was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and sponsored by Cambridge University Press. Its primary purpose was to make available to linguists and the general user alike the HUGE database of English usage guides and usage problems, which had been compiled by Robin Straaijer within the context of the research project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’. Having started in , the project itself, funded by NWO, came to an end in December . All the members of the project whose chapters are included in this volume— Carmen Ebner, Viktoriija Kostadinova, Morana Lukač, Robin Straaijer, and myself— did the research for their chapters within the project, and our work represents some of our major findings. Particularly the HUGE database, access to which can be acquired upon request, was central to our research, and our findings will hopefully inspire others to draw on this tool for their own research. As a research project we profited enormously from the presence at the symposium of the other speakers whose chapters can be found below, as well as from their comments on our work as presented here. Thanks in particular to David Crystal for his assistance with some crucial aspects of the database, to Rebecca Gowers and Pam Peters for their comments, to Mignon Fogarty for giving generous access to her own data, to Scott Morton from Nielsen Book Scan for allowing us to gain insight into the sales figures of some of the usage guides we are interested in, and to Geoffrey Pullum, John Allen, Deborah Cameron, Inge Otto, Robert Ilson, and Caroline Taggart for their papers as well as for contributing to the lively and stimulating discussions at the symposium which have helped to provide further shape to our work. Thanks finally to the University of Cambridge and Henriëtte Hendriks for hosting us, to Julia Steer from Oxford University Press and to the referees of the proposal for this collection for their faith in the project, and to Sarah Barrett for her careful and meticulous copy-editing, and to Cheryl Brant for guiding the book through its final stages. Leiden December 

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Abbreviations ABC

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

BNC

British National Corpus

CNN

Cable News Network

COCA

Corpus of Contemporary American English

COHA

Corpus of Historical American English

GloWbE

Global Web-based English

HUGE

Hyper Usage Guide of English

LCI

Garner’s Language Change Index

NBC

National Broadcasting Company

NP

noun phrase

NWO

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (‘Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research’)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

ODO

Oxford Dictionaries Online

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OFSTED

Office for Standards in Education

VP

verb phrase

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About the contributors JOHN ALLEN is a former Executive Editor of BBC Radio News and author of the BBC News Style Guide. He began his journalistic career in newspapers in Merseyside and Leicester before joining the BBC radio newsroom in . He has worked on a wide range of daily news and current affairs programmes, and was editor of Radio Four’s flagship Six O’Clock News bulletin. He is now a freelance trainer specializing in writing and editorial issues. DAVID CRYSTAL is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor, and works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. He read English at University College London, specialized in English language studies, then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, then at Reading, where he became professor of linguistics. He received an OBE for services to the English language in . CARMEN EBNER is a PhD candidate in the project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’ at the University of Leiden, where she was also briefly employed as lecturer in sociolinguistics. She received her MLitt. from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her research interests are sociolinguistics, language ideology and attitudes, and language and identity in Great Britain. REBECCA GOWERS is the author of The Swamp of Death, shortlisted for a CWA non-fiction award, and of two novels, When to Walk and The Twisted Heart, both long-listed for the Orange Prize. She is also the editor of the fourth edition of Plain Words () by her greatgrandfather, Sir Ernest Gowers. In  she devised a satirical companion work, Horrible Words: A Guide to the Misuse of English. VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, where she worked within the ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable’ project investigating language prescriptivism in present-day American English. She holds an MA in English Linguistics and Literature and an MA in Cultural Studies, both from the Catholic University of Leuven. MORANA LUKAČ is a PhD candidate in the project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’ and a lecturer in corpus linguistics at the University of Leiden. She received MA degrees from the University of Graz in Austria and the University of Osijek in Croatia. She is writing her dissertation on the topic ‘Linguistic Prescriptivism from Below’, in which she focuses on linguistic complaints in traditional and new media. PAM PETERS is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Emeritus Professor of Macquarie University. She was Director of Macquarie University’s Dictionary Research Centre (–), where she led the compilation of reference corpora for researching Australian and international English, which inform her Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage () and Cambridge Guide to English Usage (). She currently leads an international research network on ‘Varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific’.

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About the contributors

GEOFFREY K. PULLUM is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and was previously professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He co-authored (with Rodney Huddleston) a major reference grammar, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (), which won the  Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America. ROBIN STRAAIJER received master’s degrees in Chemistry and English from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from the University of Leiden, where he also built the Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database of English usage guides and usage problems in the project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’. He is currently working as an independent researcher, and planning a popular work about standard English in America. INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics). Her research interests include the final stages of English standardization—the codification of grammar and the rise and spread of prescriptivism—and the question of how grammar rules relate to actual usage. She is writing a biography of the English usage guide.

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1 Introduction INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE

Fowlerian, Fowlerish, and Fowleresque: three words in the English language that refer to what may well be called the archetypal English usage guide—H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (). This is how David Crystal begins his introduction to the facsimile reprint of the ‘classic first edition’ of the book, published by Oxford University Press in  (Crystal : vii). And I recently found another one: fowlerism, used by Patricia O’Conner in a review of the third edition of the book, edited by Robert Burchfield (). Yet none of these words are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). All four words do exist, as a search in Factiva (a database comprising newspapers and other published documents which can be used for full-text searches on any conceivable topic) confirmed: I found three instances of Fowlerian (, , ), two of Fowleresque (, ) in addition to one instance from  I had already found elsewhere (Tieken-Boon van Ostade a), and one each of Fowlerish and Fowlerism, both from —enough, it would appear, to merit adoption by the OED. Here are some examples that might be used as quotations:1 .

‘Burchfield still worked with apriori judgments about language, with little analysis of his illustrative material in its own terms. He upheld the Fowlerian paradigm.’ (Pam Peters, Letter to the Editor, The Australian,  July )

.

‘his point could be put more simply without any sacrifice of Fowleresque flavour.’ (Sir Ernest Gowers (), Modern English Usage, nd edition, p. xi)

.

‘But an occasional felicity can’t make up for the many Fowlerish delights missing in this new edition.’ (Patricia O’Conner, review of Burchfield’s edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, The New York Times,  February )

1

Here, and throughout this book, bold is used to indicate emphasis.

English Usage Guides. First edition. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.) This chapter © Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade . First published  by Oxford University Press.

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. ‘The second edition (in which Gowers thanked a younger Mr. Burchfield for “expert guidance”) swept away many creaky Fowlerisms, and the third edition clears out still more.’ (Patricia O’Conner, review of Burchfield’s edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, The New York Times,  February ) Even Fowler has word status, as is perhaps most clear from the fact that the name is construed with a definite article in the title of a paper by Ulrich Busse and Anne Schröder, ‘How Fowler became “The Fowler”: an anatomy of a success story’ (). A bit more than a decade earlier, Edward Finegan may be said to have defined the word’s meaning: ‘As the name “Webster” is synonymous with dictionary in some parts of the English-speaking world, “Fowler” continues to mean honoured handbook of usage throughout’ (: ). A year earlier, the novelist Kingsley Amis had discussed how Fowler, apart from being a name, could be used to refer to the book as well: ‘This work, known for many years simply as Modern English Usage, is also known even more simply as Fowler in expressions like “Fowler’s view” and “Fowler is unambiguous on the point” ’ (Amis : ). So since Webster does have an entry in the OED, defined as ‘designat[ing] Webster’s Dictionary (first published in ), and any of its later revisions and abridgement’ and illustrated with quotations ranging from  to  (OED, s.v. Webster, n. ), why not give Fowler one too—and, indeed, following the recent adoption of Dahlesque in honour of the th anniversary of Roald Dahl’s birth (Ramaswamy ), the derivations Fowlerian, Fowlerish, Fowleresque, and Fowlerism as well? Actual usage as a criterion for a word’s status should be enough to have it adopted as an entry by a major English dictionary like the OED. Conversely, for many people, when a word is not in the dictionary, it doesn’t exist, it isn’t English, or it isn’t even a word. This is an argument used by some of Viktorija Kostadinova’s informants when she asked them about their attitudes to usage problems—instances of contested usage—like ain’t, the use of literally as an intensifier, and like as a discourse particle, which she reports on in Chapter , ‘Usage problems in American English’. It is an argument that is often resorted to, as in John Allen’s Chapter , ‘Why does the BBC need a style guide?’, in connection with the changing status of the contested word euthanize, while Rebecca Gowers, the author of Chapter , will remember the discussion we had in a different context of the word itty, which does have an entry in the OED but whose word status I disputed (and Rebecca defended), particularly in relation to the attributed first usage by Jane Austen (Tieken-Boon van Ostade : ).2 But it is also an argument found in usage guides (the term we use in this book to refer to Finegan’s ‘handbooks of usage’, cited above), which give advice on the acceptability of usage problems. An example is A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner (), whose methodology, as adopted in the book’s third 2

See also Cynthia Lange’s discussion of the word status of thusly (Lange ).

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Introduction



edition of , Pam Peters analyses in Chapter , ‘The lexicography of English usage’. In the first edition of this book, Garner too, as Kostadinova reports, calls ain’t a ‘nonword’ (: ). That he still does so in the third edition (: ) is surprising, given his characterization of himself as ‘a kind of descriptive prescriber’ (see Smits : ). Ain’t is in widespread, if not undisputed, use, both in British and in American English, and has been for quite some time, as David Crystal’s overview of the linguistic topics discussed in Punch during the second half of the nineteenth century shows (see the appendix to his Chapter , ‘Punch as a satirical usage guide’). Ain’t, moreover, is even listed in dictionaries, though its adoption into Webster’s Third International Dictionary () produced a major outcry at the time due to the dictionary’s more descriptive stance towards usage than its previous edition. This change in approach, as Robin Straaijer discusses in Chapter , ‘The usage guide: evolution of a genre’, caused American editors for many years to ignore this new edition of the dictionary in favour of its rather more prescriptive predecessor, the second edition. Another (British) usage guide writer who claims that particular words ‘do not exist’ is Simon Heffer, the author of Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write . . . and Why it Matters () and more recently of Simply English: An A to Z of Avoidable Errors (). The comment in question was made in the context of his discussion of onto, about which he writes: ‘There is no such problem in distinguishing when a writer or speaker should use onto and on to, because onto does not exist’ (Heffer : ). Straaijer (), taking Heffer up on this claim, found that quotations for the word in the OED date back as far as , and he shows on the basis of a search in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) that usage of onto has been steadily increasing: from  instances in the s to , a hundred years later. What is more, according to Straaijer, ‘this “non-existing” item is discussed in as many as  usage guides in the HUGE database’, a database of usage guides and usage problems which we compiled in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics precisely to be able to analyse claims like Heffer’s (Straaijer ). Straaijer, moreover, found that in most of these usage guides onto has been accepted since the beginning of the twentieth century, albeit ‘sometimes grudgingly’. Heffer’s comment, perhaps, should not be taken literally, and is to be interpreted not as a linguistic observation—something for which Heffer has generally been severely criticized to begin with (see Crystal  and Pullum )—but as an attempt to rid the language of what he personally considers to be an instance of undesirable usage. Such ipse dixit commentary, as Straaijer writes in his analysis of the usage guide in Chapter , is typical of the genre, and can be found from its earliest existence onwards (see also Peters ). One of the early usage guide writers to approve of onto was Fowler, though he did allow for differences in usage with on to. Fowler first came out in , and proved enormously popular, with , copies sold before the end of the year (McMorris : ). The book has been revised and

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updated three times, most recently in  by Jeremy Butterfield. Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English () can, as I argue in Chapter , be read as a tribute to Fowler, though the echo in the title is to the work Henry Fowler published with his brother Frank in , not to Modern English Usage. An even more popular usage guide was Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words, , copies of which were sold upon its publication in  that same year alone. Rebecca Gowers, in Chapter , ‘Even more complete plain words’, writes that it ‘became an immediate bestseller’. Another bestseller, despite its poor reputation among linguists, is Simon Heffer’s Strictly English: according to the figures provided by Nielsen BookScan, a commercial book sales analysis service, the book, hardback as well as paperback (published in  and , respectively), had sold well over , copies by early November . This figure may be small compared to those quoted for Fowler and Gowers, but it is considerably higher than the number of copies that, according to my Nielsen data in any case, were sold of Bernard Lamb’s The Queen’s English and How to Use it or Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English, both of which came out in the same year as the book by Heffer, .3 Competition between usage guides today is much stronger than it was when Fowler and Gowers were first published; there are many more titles around, and this may to a large extent account for this difference in sales figures. Usage guides today are in fact highly marketable products, and have been for the past forty or fifty years. Their popularity seems quite comparable to that of cookbooks, and the question even presents itself as to whether they are similarly just being bought but rarely used, just as cookbooks tend to be. Another striking phenomenon is that usage guides continue to be published as books despite the popularity of online usage advice sites such as Grammar Girl, which Morana Lukač, in Chapter , ‘From usage guides to language blogs’, designates as ‘usage guides .’. Most recently, for instance, Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style came out in the US (), while in Britain Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen was published a year later. Updated reissues of older usage guides are likewise produced, such as Plain Words by Rebecca Gowers in  and the fourth edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, revised by Jeremy Butterfield, a year later. Competition for the market, aiming to cover both sides of the Atlantic, is most evident from the publication history of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, shown in Table .. 3 The figures supplied by Nielsen, however, do not include the sales of Taggart’s book by the National Trust, its publisher. The total sales of this book are therefore very likely be a lot higher, given the large number of annual visitors to properties in the care of this institution, in whose shops I’ve regularly seen the book on display during the year following its publication (see the National Trust’s Annual Report /: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/documents/annual-report--.pdf, p. ). As an inexpensive practical book on proper English usage, you would expect it to be easily picked up by visitors and thus to have sold well. In this light, it is remarkable that upon its appearance the book barely received any notice in the press: searching for it in Factiva, I found that it was mentioned (not reviewed) only three times, in The Guardian ( December ), in the Daily Mail ( December ), and in a Zimbabwean paper, the Sunday Mail ( November ).

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Introduction



TABLE .. Garner’s changing titles, following Fowler’s editions Fowler

Garner

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage () A Dictionary of Modern American Usage () Fowler’s Modern English Usage (nd edn, ed. Gowers, ; rd edn, ed. Burchfield, ) Garner’s Modern American Usage (nd edn, ; rd edn, ) Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (th edn, ed. Butterfield, )

Garner’s Modern English Usage (th edn, )

The change in title of the most recent edition of Garner’s book suggests that this new edition is intended to cover the entire market for English usage advice; whether it does, and whether it does accurately enough, is something future research will have to discover. Peters, in Chapter , is not the only scholar to criticize Garner’s method of collecting and analysing data for the purpose of offering usage advice (see also Kaunisto : – and Smits : ), so it will also be interesting to see to what extent his usage advice is now based on sources other than those he drew upon for the earlier editions of his usage guide. Sales figures of usage guides may well be influenced by the coverage of the books as advertised in their titles. The publisher of one of the earliest American usage guides, Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Pronouncing and Writing the English Language, Corrected (Anon. ), clearly expected that citing the number of usage problems dealt with in the book would act as an incentive for people to buy a copy. Live and Learn, another anonymous American usage guide which appears to have come out a year later (Tieken-Boon van Ostade ; see also Nance ), describes its contents on the title page with the words: ‘over  mistakes corrected’. Two other examples are Harlan H. Ballard’s Handbook of Blunders (Boston, ), which is subtitled ‘designed to prevent , common blunders in writing and speaking’, and Marian Heath Tibbals’s Many Mistakes Mended. Containing Three Thousand Corrections in Speaking, Pronouncing and Writing the English Language, published the same year (New York, ).4 Even This is the title found in Garner’s ‘Timeline of books on usage’ (Garner : –). Searching for the book on WorldCat, however, produced a title with the figure , in it; the date and place of publication are otherwise identical. 4

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

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Pam Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage () is advertised with a reference to its number of entries on the cover: ‘The new reference Guide for the st century; Over  entries; International and corpus-based’. These figures raise the question of how many usage problems there are—very likely an impossible question to answer, as Robin Straaijer points out in Chapter . There doesn’t appear to be any consensus on this question, which seems largely due to the fact that usage problems as they have come into collective existence have not very often been treated as a topic worth serious linguistic interest. A complicating factor here is that it all depends on what is counted: some usage guides include long lists of individual instances (as in the case of flat adverbs and variable adjectives in -ic/ical), while others treat these as examples within single entries (Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade forthc.; Kaunisto ; Straaijer, Chapter  in this volume). On the one hand this lack of consensus is due to the discipline of linguistics traditionally advocating itself as being descriptive, not prescriptive (see Cameron ); a good example is John Lyons’s Language and Linguistics: An Introduction (), where we find a section headed ‘Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive’. In this section, Lyons explains the difference between ‘describing [which is] how things are and prescribing [which is] how things ought to be’. Linguists, in other words, are not as a rule interested in the topic of prescriptivism. Notable exceptions are David Crystal, Pam Peters, Steven Pinker, Don Chapman, and Mark Kaunisto (cf. Andersson and Trudgill ), as well as professional lexicographers like Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut.5 Even among sociolinguists the subject is not usually discussed; so far, I have found Mesthrie et al. () to be the only exception in this respect. Anne Curzan, in her recent book Fixing English (), rightly pleads for more (socio) linguistic attention to the subject (see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade b). On the other hand, we need to take into account the fact that usage guides are largely published by writers who are not linguists, and as such do not as a rule have a descriptive incentive to deal with the topic. Many authors of usage guides are journalists, editors, text writers, or novelists; examples are Oliver Kamm, Simon Heffer, Patricia O’Conner, Bill Bryson, Mignon Fogarty, and Kingsley Amis. Though no linguists, these are nevertheless all experienced writers and consequently can be expected to have, as Jack Lynch writes in The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, ‘a good practical grasp of the language’ (Lynch : ). Bernard Lamb, however, the author of The Queen’s English and Why Should One Use It? (), is a geneticist, and one wonders what his publisher Michael O’Mara’s reasons may have been to invite him to write a usage guide (as Lamb states in his Acknowledgements) other than Lamb’s status as President of the Queen’s English Society. This trend, however, as Straaijer writes in Chapter , has been changing, and linguists have entered the field 5 See further my own study of the usage guide as a genre, English Usage Guides: The Biography of a Genre (Tieken-Boon van Ostade in progress).

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Introduction



as well, as already illustrated earlier in this paragraph. Nevertheless, usage guides by non-linguists continue to appear as well. Even among the linguists who have written usage guides, there is no consensus as to what the most significant usage problems are. Often, it is unclear on what grounds usage problems were selected for inclusion into their usage guides. Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style (), for instance, lists ‘a hundred of the most common issues of grammar, diction (word choice), and punctuation’ (: ), yet other than saying that these represent a ‘judicious’ choice’, he doesn’t specify what his selection principles were. When I asked him about this, he explained that his choice of usage problems had been informed by what he found in ‘traditional manuals, [by what is] widely seen on pet-peeve lists, [what is] discussed on radio shows, and so on’ as well as by consulting the American Heritage Dictionary.6 Again, it seems, the decision on what to select is very much made on the basis of a writer’s personal preferences, and this has been a typical characteristic of the usage guide as a genre from the very beginning. According to Christian Mair in Twentieth-Century English (), usage problems in English are part of ‘a body of folk-linguistic knowledge whose truth is taken for granted and no longer challenged even in scholarly publications’, and it is this body of knowledge that writers apparently draw on for their selection. Other scholars before Mair, such as Emma Vorlat () in relation to her study of the late eighteenth-century normative grammarian Lindley Murray’s work, have referred to this body of folk-linguistic knowledge as a ‘prescriptive canon’. Though usage problems come and go, and have done so from the earliest days of the usage guide tradition onwards, this canon shows some remarkable consistency, on the basis of which quite a few usage problems have acquired the label ‘old chestnut’ (Weiner : ; Peters : ). Over the years, however, attitudes towards these old chestnuts have changed considerably (see Ebner forthc.; Kostadinova in progress), and it is to study developments in this respect that the HUGE database was compiled. Usage guides, however, are not the only platform for the treatment of usage problems. I have already referred to usage advice provided on the web, the development of which is discussed by Morana Lukač in Chapter . What we would identify as usage problems were also topics that lent themselves to satirical treatment by the contributors to Punch, as David Crystal shows in Chapter . His list of linguistic topics treated by Punch include the dangling free adjunct, the use of me for I, Americanisms, apostrophe placement, lie/lay (as in overlaid), split infinitives (described under ‘The latest thing in crime’), and ain’t. All these features are found in usage guides as well (and, with the exception of Americanisms, they can all be studied through HUGE), so the information from Punch will offer useful additional information to our knowledge of the historical status of such usage problems. That Americanisms were already being 6 Many thanks to Steven Pinker for informing me about this (personal communication,  October ).

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Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

criticized in the s, for instance, is of considerable interest;7 we also find them included as a five-page entry in Kingsley Amis’s usage guide The King’s English () (see my own Chapter  on Amis and the question of whether the book should be considered a usage guide at all). Usage guides overlap in their contents with style guides, the difference between the two being described elsewhere by Carmen Ebner with respect to their intended audience—the general public for usage guides, and ‘professional writers, journalists, students and those interesting in improving their style or writing skills’ (: ) for style guides. A style guide is therefore typically the type of document needed by journalists and news writers who work for a company like the BBC, as John Allen argues in Chapter , ‘Why does the BBC need a style guide?’. One of the recommendations in his BBC Style Guide (Allen ) is to avoid ‘the too rapid adoption of Americanisms’—still, evidently, a sensitive topic among the general public today, though also among the news writers themselves, as Anya Luscombe discusses in Sending the Right Message: Forty Years of BBC News (). Usage guides and style guides may sometimes not be easy to distinguish, and Pinker’s The Sense of Style is a good example of this: while the first five chapters function as a style guide according to Carmen Ebner’s definition, the final chapter, ‘Telling right from wrong’, provides straightforward usage advice and might consequently be called a usage guide if it had been published independently. Had the book been available at the time we were collecting the material for the HUGE database, the chapter would quite possibly have been included as well. Yet another source of information on usage problems, though not a linguistic one, comprises etiquette books, as was discovered by Paul Nance. Such books, Nance () writes, as they were published around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, provided guides not only on matters of etiquette but also on proper language, as an important requirement for those who wished ‘to fit into polite society’. Nance’s account includes the old chestnuts lie/lay, who/whom, it is I/me, and shall/will as well as a number of other features. The use of ‘proper’ language is considered a key issue, both by many usage guide writers and by their readers, which may help explain the popularity of usage guides across the years. We see this not just with writers who offered usage advice in the past, like Josephine Turck Baker, whose purpose in publishing the magazine Correct English between the late s and the early s ‘was to help her readers learn “to conduct themselves in proper (i.e. elite) society” ’ (Nance ; see also Kostadinova ), but also with one of the most recent publications in the HUGE database, Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyshship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (). In this book, Taggart adopts the persona of ‘her ladyship’ as a means of imposing a norm of correctness that has many conservative characteristics. Taggart’s pronouncements, though also those of Heffer and Lamb—all three published in Britain in —often 7 On the basis of her analysis of the presence of prescriptivism in Dickens’s journals, Queiroz de Barros (: ) found that American influence on the English language was already criticized during the s.

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Introduction



go against the general trend we noticed towards greater acceptability of the old chestnuts (see e.g. Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade forthc. and Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Ebner ), but this may be just what their readers want. It may well be the books’ conservative stance that is responsible for their popularity. ‘Proper English’ is a key term in Carmen Ebner’s research (see Ebner forthc.) and indeed in Chapter  in this volume, where she reports on a survey she conducted among a similar group of informants to those consulted on the acceptability of  usage items by Mittins et al. () during the late s, here for five of these usage problems. A change in attitude was indeed found to occur over the years, in line with the increasing trend towards informality of usage which Mair () has identified for the twentieth century. Age, Ebner found, is an important factor that contributes towards an increasing acceptability of many—not all!—of the usage problems making up the prescriptive canon. New usage problems arise as well (see also Vriesendorp ), and Viktorija Kostadinova in Chapter  discusses the focusing discourse marker like (something always, like, gets in the way), though it was already mentioned in an American usage guide as early as , as well as being satirized by Kingsley Amis in his novel Jake’s Thing () (this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to . . . , p. ). This use of like, Kostadinova’s informants told her, ‘is becoming very widespread’, and is particularly associated with the language of the young. Its high frequency of usage, as I argue in Chapter  in the case of the usage problems adopted by Kingsley Amis for The King’s English () (see also Ilson : ), may well cause it to become a staple usage problem in the years to come. The final question to be asked here, which is addressed by Geoffrey Pullum in Chapter , is what makes usage guides so popular when so many of them, even authoritative and iconic ones like Fowler and Gowers, are available already and when usage advice can readily (perhaps even more readily) be obtained from the internet. It is particularly striking—and, for linguists, disturbing—to see that some of them continue to sell so well despite their poor treatment of usage items from a linguistic perspective. Pullum () has already written elsewhere about the questionable contents of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (), yet the book continues to be extremely popular, as may be illustrated from the Dutch writer Pia de Jong’s excitement over the fact that she received two (!) copies of the book from American friends as birthday presents (de Jong ). All this confirms the wide gap that exists between usage guide writers and linguists on the one hand—the case of Heffer is a good example: despite strong and well-founded linguistic criticism from David Crystal and Geoffrey Pullum, he produced an alphabetically arranged version of Strictly English () in the form of his new Simply English ()8—and between

8 See Morana Lukač’s comment to the post ‘Basically . . . rather good’ (Tieken-Boon van Ostade a).

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

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

linguists and the general public on the other. Despite well-founded linguistic criticism, Strunk and White continues to sell well, and I expect that this will similarly be the case for Heffer’s latest publication. Though the gap would consequently seem unbridgeable after all, it is attempts like those presented in the following chapters to take a critically empirical approach to the topic of prescriptivism that should eventually cause the tide to change.

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2 The usage guide Evolution of a genre RO B I N S T RA A I J E R

. Introduction: what makes a usage guide? ‘What are we to make of that neglected genre, the Usage Guide?’ Edmund Weiner asked himself nearly thirty years ago (: ). In its most basic definition, a usage guide is a book, aimed at a general audience, which provides advice on language use.1 In this chapter I will explore the English usage guide as it has evolved as a genre since the publication of the first guide in the eighteenth century, and in the light of what it is today. For this exploration, I will draw on data from the Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database which I have compiled for the research project Bridging the Unbridgeable at the University of Leiden (Straaijer ). In this project, we study usage guides and usage problems and try to bridge the communication gap between the general public and linguists, usage guide writers, and others who are professionally concerned with linguistic correctness. The HUGE database contains a selection of English usage guides and usage problems from the late eighteenth century up to the previous decade.2 It was conceived to provide useful insights into the genre and the subject matter dealt with, and to identify areas regarding usage that deserve further study. .. Definitions of the usage guide What is and what is not a usage guide is not easy to describe. A usage guide lists the meaning of words, but it is not a dictionary—although it can be set up like one. 1 There is a veritable deluge of usage advice available on the internet (see Lukač, Ch.  this volume); however, in this chapter I am only concerned with usage guides that have appeared in print. Considering the differences between the two in format and use, I regard online sources as a separate genre—albeit one which is definitely worthy of being studied for its own sake. 2 More information about the construction and content of the HUGE database is available on the website of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project (https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/hugedb/).

English Usage Guides. First edition. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.) This chapter © Robin Straaijer . First published  by Oxford University Press.

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

Robin Straaijer

A usage guide discusses grammatical structures, but it is not a grammar. As Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade notes, ‘the usage guide is a different phenomenon [from grammars] altogether, in that rather than focusing on actual grammar, it aims to point out and correct linguistic errors and—increasingly—to offer the public some entertainment in the process’ (: ). Tom McArthur describes usage guides as ‘books caught halfway between dictionary and school grammar book—that told you straight what good usage was and was not’ (McArthur : ). A good definition of the genre is, however, a little more complicated than that. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we needed to have a definition of the genre of usage guides to be able to delimit the scope of the project’s investigation, and to determine which titles would be put into the HUGE database and which would not. This meant deciding which works were usage guides and which were not.3 It turned out that the genre was not clearly defined, so part of our thinking about usage guides has been about defining the genre. One of our criteria was that since the HUGE database primarily deals with usage problems of a grammatical nature, a work should deal with grammatical usage problems—though not necessarily exclusively— in order to be considered a member of the genre. The usage guide constitutes a specific form of prescriptivist discourse, aimed at a wide audience which consists of ‘native speakers or advanced learners’ of a language (Weiner : ), English in our case. Weiner continues by saying that the usage guide ‘addresses itself to a tiny fragment of the language, or rather to a number of tiny fragments, for the subjects it treats are not inherently linked together, as the phenomena explored in a grammar are interconnected by being part of an overall system’ (: ). Weiner describes the scope of a usage guide as follows: In one dimension, the scope of a usage guide is as broad as the English language, covering, spelling, punctuation, phonology and morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations. But obviously a usage guide does not describe the whole language. It takes for granted the bulk of it, and it assumes that its audience are native speakers or advanced learners. It has nothing to say about some of the central facts about language, while going into great detail about others. (: )

I have taken this description as a starting point to start thinking about how to differentiate between various genres on language, some of which are more normative than others.

3 Not all the usage guides ever published are in the database. Based on bibliographical research by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and myself, I estimate that somewhere between  and  usage guides have been published since , depending on the exact definition of the genre and on whether (considerably) revised editions are counted as individual titles or not. Therefore, when a title is not in the database, this doesn’t automatically mean that it is not a usage guide according to our definition.

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The usage guide



.. Circumnavigating the genre Both in form and content, the modern usage guide draws on elements from several other genres. Figure . shows how usage guides relate to and overlap with other genres that deal with related topics, such as dictionaries, writing guides, grammars, and popular books on language. This overview is based mainly on the form and content of the various genres, but it can equally apply to other aspects such as authorial intent and target audience. Before going into the similarities and differences between these genres, it should be noted first that my classification is based on genres of language-related books that exist in the English language, and that such a classification may be slightly different for other languages which may have different genres altogether; and secondly that the borders between these genres are fuzzy—in some cases fuzzier than others. To start with ‘dictionaries’, these overlap with usage guides and have been a major influence on the genre. Over the years, an increasing number of usage guides have come to resemble dictionaries in form, especially the more modern ones that are meant to be used as reference works. This is not surprising, since that is the genre upon which they are often modelled, which may be signalled explicitly by the word dictionary in the title of a usage guide. Some usage guides are even based on existing dictionaries, such as Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage and The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. These usage guides essentially function as companions to the respective dictionaries, i.e. the different Merriam-Webster

scientific literature popular language writing

descriptive grammar school grammar

USAGE GUIDE

textbook

dictionary spelling guide

writing guide

rhetorical guide

style guide

FIGURE .. The usage guide and related genres

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

Robin Straaijer

dictionaries and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, respectively. Usage guides resemble dictionaries in that both genres discuss the spelling, meaning, and sometimes even the etymology of words. Apart from the obvious absence of comments on syntactical constructions or on matters of style, dictionaries (for the most part) don’t always provide explicit usage advice. ‘Descriptive grammars’ describe the structure of the language. These are usually written by linguists, and examples are A Communicative Grammar of English (Leech and Svartvik ) and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum ). Both descriptive grammars and usage guides describe grammatical issues and are intended as reference works. However, as a rule, descriptive grammars aim to describe usage items neutrally rather than as ‘problems’, and they usually do not give explicit usage advice.4 In addition, they are mostly intended for a specific audience of language students or specialists, rather than for a general audience of language users. I use the term ‘textbook’ in Figure . to refer to books that are used to teach language, whether to native speakers or to foreign language learners. In Figure ., a genre such as ‘school grammar’ is found in the overlapping area between textbooks, grammars, and usage guides. Many of these works are published by educational publishers such as Collins and Cambridge University Press. They are similar to usage guides in that they discuss usage problems and give advice on usage, including aspects relating to pragmatics. The main difference is that usage guides are mainly intended for native speakers, whereas textbooks are largely aimed at non-native speakers. In addition, usage guides are usually stand-alone works, whereas textbooks can also be an integrated part of a language course. For our purposes, the term ‘scientific literature’ in Figure . refers to books, journal articles, or chapters in collections about usage, usage guides, and usage problems, written by linguists. In contrast to usage guides, however, scientific literature on usage gives no advice on actual usage, but discusses usage problems on a meta-level. As in descriptive grammars, usage items are not discussed there as problems, with the purpose of offering advice about their use. They are, in other words, not regarded as problems on a linguistic level, but they can be regarded as problems on a metalinguistic level. Usage problems are discussed as indicators of style and register, or in the context of how the people that use them are evaluated in society. ‘Popular language writing’ is a large and diverse genre, with many titles by popular writers as well as linguists and other academics. Examples are books like Linguistics and Your Language (Hall ), Paradigms Lost (Simon ), The Language Instinct (Pinker ), and Language Myths (Bauer and Trudgill ), which were all written for a general audience. Certain magazines or newspapers also regularly publish popular articles on usage. Many of these books and articles discuss the same ‘old 4 The fact that this is not exclusively so illustrates why it is sometimes difficult to clearly draw distinctions between the genres discussed here.

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The usage guide



chestnuts’, items of usage that are particularly socially salient and occur again and again in discussions about usage (Weiner : ). Depending on the intentions of the author, some of these publications also provide usage advice in a similar form as a usage guide. What is very different about these texts compared to usage guides is that they tend not to focus on usage specifically, but to aim at making broader linguistic or social arguments with respect to the acceptability of particular issues of language use. I have left the discussion of the categories ‘writing guides’ and ‘style guides’ to the last because this is where the borders between genres are at their fuzziest, which is also why I deal with them together. Handbooks on writing and style guides are closely related genres, if in fact they are different genres at all. Of the genres I have discussed here, they are also the most similar to usage guides. Examples are the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Gabaldi ), The Chicago Manual of Style (), Guardianstyle (Marsh ), and The BBC News Styleguide (Allen ) (see Allen, Chapter  in this volume). Writing guides are different from usage guides in that they are not merely concerned with usage, but aim to instruct the reader in various aspects of writing, including the composition and structure of texts. Style guides have an even more specific (and smaller) target audience, as they are usually designed for in-house use by the organizations that produce them, such as newspapers and broadcasters, as well as for external writers producing texts for such organizations (see also Ebner ); or they are used for instruction in a specific genre of such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The style guide has a very specific subgenre in the form of the style sheet, which comprises rules of specific publishers for formatting documents. Besides formatting, however, style sheets sometimes also include guidelines on spelling, usually with regard to which variety of English is to be adhered to. The fuzziness between the genres discussed here shows itself in that specific titles can sometimes be hard to place definitively in one of these genres. An example is David Crystal’s Who Cares about English Usage? (), which resembles a usage guide quite closely but could equally be seen as a popular work on language. A work such as The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage (Sutcliffe ) could arguably be seen as either a usage guide or a writing guide.5 .. A bottom-up definition The above attempt at classifying different types of usage-related publications is a kind of top-down method of defining a genre. Another way is the bottom-up approach, which I adopted by using the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog as a crowdsourcing 5 For the purpose of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, both these titles are considered usage guides and have been included in the HUGE database.

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Robin Straaijer

Writing manual 20% Style guide 53% Dictionary 13%

Descriptive grammar 7%

Popular writing on language 0%

School grammar 0%

Spelling / punctuation guide 7%

FIGURE .. Responses to the statement ‘Usage guides are most like . . . ’

platform.6 The usage guide is first and foremost a practical genre, and I would expect writers of usage guides to be curious about what their intended readership thinks their books should be like. To this end, but without explaining in advance what I considered usage guides to be like, I asked readers of the blog which of the types of normative linguistic work they believed the usage guide to resemble most: a dictionary, a spelling or punctuation guide, a descriptive grammar, a school grammar, popular writing on language, a writing manual, or a style guide.7 The results of the survey are given in Figure .. Unfortunately, the type of online poll used doesn’t allow us to retrieve the number of respondents, but the majority of them felt that usage guides were most like style guides (%). In addition, a fair number of the respondents felt they were most like handbooks on writing (%) or dictionaries (%), and to a lesser extent that they were comparable to spelling/punctuation guides or descriptive grammars (% each). I should note here, however, that I only provided the terms of these genres and did not offer a description of them, leaving this open to interpretation by the respondents. Nevertheless, the results give an indication of the focus areas that people associate usage guides with.

6 The Bridging the Unbridgeable blog is located at: http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com. It was set up to share scientific linguistic findings about usage with a wide audience, thereby trying to build a bridge between the communities of linguists, language professionals, and the general public. 7 Blogpost from  April  at: http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com////what-makes-ausage-guide/. The poll is still open and can be accessed to view results; the results reported here were collected on  June .

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The usage guide



Style 31%

Syntax 44%

Meaning of words 19%

Other 6%

Pronunciation 0%

Spelling 0% Punctuation 0%

FIGURE .. Responses to the statement ‘Usage guides should primarily deal with . . . ’.

In a second survey, I asked readers of the blog what area(s) of the language usage guides should primarily deal with, providing them with the following options: syntax, pronunciation, punctuation, the meaning of words, spelling, style, and ‘other’.8 The results are shown in Figure .. Style, it appears from the results, is regarded as an important feature, but the treatment of syntax is considered the most important in usage guides. Oddly enough, while Figure . shows that syntax is considered important, Figure . strongly suggests that usage guides are not very closely associated with descriptive grammars, which specifically discuss syntax. This suggests that for some reason syntax was not immediately associated with descriptive grammars. It is also striking that none of the respondents felt that spelling, punctuation, or pronunciation need to be dealt with in usage guides, though these are in fact staple features of the genre (cf. Weiner :  and Tieken-Boon van Ostade ). A question that remains to be answered is how the category ‘other’ was interpreted.

. Historical development If the first English usage guide appeared in , how has the genre evolved during the nearly  years of its existence? Obviously, it is impossible to give the complete history of the genre within the space of this chapter, but I will give an overview of its 8 Blogpost from  June  at: http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com////what-makes-a-usageguide-part-/.

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development from the second half of the eighteenth century until the first decade of the twenty-first.9 In doing so, I will focus mostly on formal features.10 .. Eighteenth-century precursors and beginnings The first English usage guide is Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language, In the Nature of Vaugelas’ on the French, published in  (Tieken-Boon van Ostade ). It was described by S. A. Leonard as ‘the ancestor of those handbooks of abuses and corrections which were so freely produced in the nineteenth century’ (Leonard : ). Very little is known about Baker, apart from the fact that he appears to have been a ‘hack writer’ whose book became successful because ‘it was published at the right moment in time, at a point in the history of the English standardisation process when there was . . . a demand for usage guides, particularly among the rising middle classes’ (Tieken-Boon van Ostade a: ). Naturally, the usage guide did not emerge out of nowhere in . It seems to have originated from the more proscriptive elements of eighteenth-century English grammars that we also find in Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar () and Joseph Priestley’s Rudiments of English Grammar (, ), of which the former was especially popular. ‘Lowth was aware of the fact that his grammar was basically a practical grammar, that it dealt with language at the level of usage, not with grammar as an abstract system,’ according to Tieken-Boon van Ostade (a: ). And with usage comments ‘in the footnotes to his section on syntax’, his grammar can be seen as ‘a precursor’ to the ‘guide to correct usage’ (Tieken-Boon van Ostade a: ). Priestley went one step further and collected usage advice from the footnotes of the first edition of his Rudiments of English Grammar () into to a separate section of ‘Notes and Observations’ in the second edition, which was published seven years later. The ‘Notes and Observations’ also included many new strictures, which made up roughly twothirds of the entire grammar. Many of the new strictures appear to have been taken from Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (Straaijer : –) With hindsight, the appearance of an entirely separate book of usage advice seems to have been inevitable, as a logical progression from the earlier formats mentioned here. But the truth is that several historical and cultural factors coincided in England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century to create the right circumstances for the genesis of this genre. Possibly the most important of these is the rise of a prescriptive climate in the eighteenth century (Tieken-Boon van Ostade : ), combined with an increased public consciousness of linguistic prescriptions because of their discussion in contemporary magazines (Percy ). 9 This section owes much to E. Ward Gilman’s excellent article ‘A brief history of English usage’ (Gilman : a–a), prefixed to Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. 10 There are other features that seem to be typical of the genre, such as similarities between the backgrounds of authors of usage guides (Tieken-Boon van Ostade : –).

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.. Nineteenth-century development and polemics Whereas the late eighteenth century saw the birth of the usage guide, the genre did not mature until the early twentieth century (I will come back to this). So what happened in the meantime, and how did the genre develop in the intervening year period? In essence, the usage guide is a genre that focuses on errors in usage that need to be corrected. In the nineteenth century, this is signalled explicitly by such titles as the anonymously published The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected ( []) and Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Pronouncing and Writing the English Language, Corrected (Anon. ). What is new in the nineteenth century is that the word use becomes part of the explicit vocabulary of the genre with the publication of Richard Grant White’s Words and their Uses (). While still focusing on errors, another work puts it less explicitly, and calls itself a ‘guide’: the anonymously published Live and Learn: A Guide for All, who Wish to Speak and Write Correctly (c.). The most noticeable nineteenth-century developments of the genre are not in content, but in format. Obviously, since as far as can be ascertained, Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language is the only eighteenth-century usage guide, anything new is therefore technically speaking an innovation in the genre. That being said, and despite its now seeming trivialness, the most striking nineteenthcentury innovation also proved to be the most important one in the entire history of the genre: the introduction of an alphabetical arrangement of the items dealt with. During most of the nineteenth century, guides tend to be arranged by topic, or— like Baker’s Reflections—are not organized at all (see also section ..). Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector () is the first guide to use a form of alphabetical organization. The alphabetical arrangement in Hurd’s guide is, however, a secondary form of organization, since the main order of the book is by topic. The book has seven main sections, or general topics, such as ‘Common Errors of Speech’, ‘Tautology and Redundancy’, and ‘Americanisms’. Within these topics, the individual entries are arranged alphabetically. The Verbalist () is the first guide of which the primary organization is alphabetical, which according to Alfred Ayres, the author, was done ‘[f]or convenience’ sake’ (Ayres [] : iv). A second nineteenth-century development was ‘the usage book that consists of pieces first written for a newspaper or magazine and then collected into a book along with selected comments and suggestions by readers’ (Gilman : a). It was this type of work that led to a type of usage guide that was typical of the nineteenth century: the polemic (Finegan : –). A number of usage guides from this period are characterized by their polemical nature, which is perhaps more of a social innovation than a formal one. The polemic usage guide seems to have started in , when Henry Alford, then the Dean of Canterbury, published The Queen’s English,

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a collection of newspaper and magazine articles on English usage. The following year, George Washington Moon published The Dean’s English (), which consisted of a virtual item-by-item comment on Alford’s work. The ensuing ‘controversy fueled several editions of both books and seems to have entertained readers on both sides of the Atlantic’ (Gilman : a). In America, Edward S. Gould published Good English; Or, Popular Errors in Language (), which was similar to Alford’s book. Gould included comments on Alford’s work, and besides acknowledging Moon’s criticisms of Alford, he also added some criticism on Moon’s English and Noah Webster’s proposed spelling reforms. In , ‘Moon replied with The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers on the English Language’ (Gilman : a)—in which Gould was named as one of the ‘other writers’. Richard Grant White’s Words and their Uses () is another example of a usage guide in the form of a collection of previously published articles. But White also added to the polemic by taking ‘a solitary whack at Dean Alford for his sneer at American English’ (Gilman : a). White’s own errors were in turn exposed by Fitzedward Hall in his Recent Exemplifications of False Philology (), thereby keeping the polemic going for another round. It seems that ‘[l]anguage controversy sold books in America as well as in England’ (Gilman : a). .. Early to mid-twentieth-century maturation and Fowler The twentieth century is when the primary alphabetical organization of usage guides really takes off, possibly under the influence of new, modern dictionaries, such as The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray et al.  , originally called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles) and Webster’s New International Dictionary (Allen and Harris ), which appeared in the first quarter of the century. The alphabetical organization allowed the usage guide to develop into a proper reference work, often as a companion to ‘the dictionary’, and achieving almost equal status with it.11 The first usage guide that explicitly presented itself as a dictionary was also arguably the most influential usage guide ever to be published for the English language: Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (). The origin of the popularity of the book has been well explored, and Fowler himself has remained a subject of interest.12 The Dictionary of Modern English Usage was ‘written in a tradition mainly inherited from two works of the nineteenth century, one British . . . and the other American’ (Burchfield : ), by which Burchfield is referring to the works of Henry Alford and Richard Grant White, respectively (see Busse ). ‘It was the work of a private scholar writing in virtual seclusion in the island of Guernsey,’ 11 See also McArthur () on the similarities in social status between usage handbooks and dictionaries. 12 See e.g. McMorris (), and the references in Burchfield (), Peters (), Busse and Schröder ().

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Burchfield wrote in his preface to the third edition of the book (: vii), but Fowler’s book, Busse and Schröder (: ) argue, ‘is not just one in a long row of usage guides but a special case, and arguably the most influential usage guide throughout the th century’. In fact, in the course of the twentieth century, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage became ‘the generic model for prescriptive usage books’ (Peters : ). The titles of usage guides illustrate a shifting focus of the genre. Following Fowler, many twentieth-century usage guides explicitly become ‘dictionaries’ of ‘usage’ (e.g. Horwill , Evans and Evans , and Nicholson ) rather than lists or ‘errors’ to be corrected. The term ‘guide’ also starts to be used extensively in the titles of usage guides, with George Philip Krapp’s A Comprehensive Guide to Good English () being the first one—in the HUGE database at least—since Live and Learn. Again, Fowler seems to have set the norm, as ‘usage’ becomes the most commonly used term for the subject of the genre, providing us with its name: ‘usage guide’. .. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century professionalization and entertainment In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the genre matures further and becomes increasingly professional. There is an increasing awareness and development of methodology in the writing of usage guides, thus placing a greater emphasis on providing evidence of usage and references. The two most prominent developments in this period are the use of language corpora and judgement panels. Simply put, a language corpus is a collection of texts. More specifically, a language corpus is nowadays kept in electronic form so that it can be read and analysed by computers, and, depending on the way it has been compiled, a corpus is considered to be representative of a specific kind of text, or variety of a language. Robert Burchfield emphasized his use of corpus data for his work on the third edition of ‘Fowler’, which was published as The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (): From the outset it was obvious to me that a standard work on English usage needed to be based on satisfactory modern evidence and that a great deal of this evidence could be obtained and classified by electronic means. . . . I obtained a personal computer and began to establish a database consisting of ten independent fields corresponding to obvious categories of grammar and usage. (Burchfield : ix)

Another usage guide to make use of corpus evidence was Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage (), which is partly based on a corpus of (at least partly) legal texts.13 Judgement panels were also used as a source of reference and authority (see Peters : ). The editors of The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary 13 Garner used the Nexis and Westlaw corpora (Garner : ) (see also Peters, Ch.  this volume). The former is more general in content, whereas the latter is a specialized corpus of legal texts.

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Usage and Style (Pickett et al. ) were among the first to refer—though not always to defer—to a large panel of language authorities assembled for the dictionary on which the work was based. The panel consists predominantly of writers of fiction and non-fiction, with some well-known names such as Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, John Simon, Annie Proulx, and James Gleick. It also included a number of linguists such as Elizabeth Traugott and Geoffrey Nunberg, the latter of whom also chaired the panel for the third edition.14 In a counter-movement to this professionalization, a different type of usage guide started to appear from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. These guides are typically organized by topic rather than alphabetically, and contain a relatively small selection of usage items. They are meant to be read cover to cover, and aim for a more general audience. These guides offer entertainment value as well as guidance on language use, with the former aspect seeming to become more and more prominent. They often have a light or even humorous tone, and mostly use anecdotal evidence in support of their ipse dixit type of judgements. In a sense, they take us back full circle to the late eighteenth century, to Baker’s Reflections on the English Language, which, because of its random organization, should be seen as a ‘form of entertainment rather than as a practical usage guide’ (Tieken-Boon van Ostade : ). Modern examples of this type are David Crystal’s Who Cares about English Usage? (), Patricia O’Conner’s Woe is I (), Kingsley Amis’s posthumously published The King’s English () (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Chapter  in this volume), and Simon Heffer’s Strictly English (). Crystal’s book is at the same time an example of a book about usage written by a professional linguist for a wider audience, a trend that continued—though sporadically—into the present millennium with, for example, the publication of Pam Peters’s Cambridge Guide to English Usage (). We also see a resurgence of an overt appeal to nostalgia in usage guides, and especially to ‘the Queen’s English’. Examples of this are Harry Blamires’ The Queen’s English (), and more recently Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English () and Bernard Lamb’s The Queen’s English and How to Use It (). These books echo Alford () and the Fowler brothers’ The King’s English (), and also fall within the subgenre of entertaining—yet serious—usage guides. Referring back to Figure ., we can conclude that the two types of usage guides discussed in this section resemble different genres of other works: the usage guide as a reference work is more like a dictionary, while the more entertaining usage guide more closely resembles popular works on language. So we can say that at present the main division within the genre of English usage guides is between these two types.

14 The current panel of the American Heritage Dictionary is chaired by the cognitive linguist Steven Pinker.

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. Formal features of usage guides I would now like to discuss some of these formal features of the genre of usage guides: their organization, their selection of usage problems, and the question of how comprehensive the usage guides are. For this discussion, I will draw on data from the works included in the HUGE database. .. The arrangement of usage guides I have already referred to one feature regarding the arrangement of a usage guide in the previous section: alphabetization. The timeline shown in Figure . gives an overview of the usage guides in the HUGE database with regard to what type of arrangement was used in which period (primary horizontal axis), indicated by the wide grey bars, and the number of usage guides using these forms of arrangement (secondary horizontal axis), indicated by the narrow black bars. The categories ‘alphabetical only’ and ‘topical only’ include books that exclusively use these respective forms of organization. The categories ‘alphabetical’ and ‘topical’ include works that use these respective arrangements, but not exclusively, because each may also use the other form as well. The category ‘alphabetical and topical’ covers only guides that use both forms of organization. Of all usage guides in the HUGE database,  per cent are organized only alphabetically, against  per cent only topically;  per cent are arranged topically as well as alphabetically; only  per cent show any lack of arrangement of the contents; and as much as  per cent have some form of alphabetical order. As I have mentioned, Seth Hurd’s A Grammatical Corrector () was the first usage guide to employ some form of alphabetical organization. Hurd’s book is rather unusual for its time in another sense, in that the author provided a comprehensive list of references for his examples, which was not typical of such a work in the nineteenth 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100% alphabetical topical alphabetical and topical alphabetical only topical only

17 70 17 90 18 10 18 30 18 50 18 70 18 90 19 10 19 30 19 50 19 70 19 90 20 10

without overt arrangement

FIGURE .. Organization of usage guides across time (black bar: percentage of usage guides in the HUGE database that show a particular arrangement; grey bar: time period in which this arrangement occurs)

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century. In fact, references to the geographical origin of examples are often not given in later usage guides either (cf. Tieken-Boon van Ostade ). Providing full references to literary and other sources only seems to have become common practice after usage guide authors started to draw on language corpora for their examples— although it was being done before as well, for example in Fowler and Fowler (), but also already as early as in Baker (). However, although—with Hurd () being the only exception—an alphabetical arrangement of the material is the most recent way of organizing a usage guide, this has become the most widely used type of structure today. .. The usage problems discussed in usage guides The selection of the topics included in a usage guide is almost wholly determined by the preference of the author, as noted by Pam Peters and Wendy Young: certain topics have indeed become conventional for usage books, and the commentators note without justification what is ‘right’/‘wrong’, ‘preferred’/‘to be avoided’ . . . The writer’s value system is foregrounded, with little attempt to correlate judgements with external sources, either primary or secondary. (Peters and Young : )

The usage guide, therefore, is a strongly author-driven genre, which means that there is much variation in form and content within its boundaries. Indeed, not only the level of acceptability of certain usages but also the question of which material to include in the first place depends on the authors of usage guides and the choices they make, which consequently may vary greatly from one guide to the next. What most, if not all, usage guides include are the ‘old chestnuts’ of English usage (see section ..)—usage problems that occur in most usage guides. The precise list of such items varies somewhat from guide to guide, but usually includes the (perceived) ban on splitting infinitives, beginning a sentence with And or But, using hopefully as a sentence adverb, and literally for emphasis rather than in its literal meaning. These usage problems have a high degree of social salience: the general public is acutely aware of them, and can often explain why their usage is judged to be incorrect. These old chestnuts represent only a very small number of the items discussed in any usage guide, though they are often the most controversial. But usage guides discuss many other usage problems as well.15 The selection of which usage problems are discussed, and especially how extensively they are dealt with, is a matter of individual preference with the author or editor of each guide. To illustrate the variety of these selection principles, words of 15 To give an indication of the number of usage items discussed in an average usage guide: one of our placement students in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project started tabulating the usage problems of a part of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage ( []). The entries for A–D alone yielded over , entries (though many are merely cross-references).

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foreign origin can show variation in having both native—Greek or Latin, for instance, or even Hebrew—and anglicized plural forms. An example is the word cherub, which has the plural forms cherubim (from its Hebrew origin) and cherubs (based on English). Which form a writer will use depends on the context and their personal preference. Which one is recommended may similarly depend on the personal preference of the author of the guide. Some of these words with two plurals undergo semantic differentiation, so that the native and anglicized plurals came to have different meanings. An example of this is medium, which has the plurals media and mediums. In these cases, which of the two forms is selected depends on the intended meaning (the form mediums is sometimes reserved for the plural of a psychic medium; see also Peters, Chapter  in this volume). The extent to which these types of usage problems are discussed varies by usage guide, depending on the preference of its author. One guide may discuss many such problems, each under its own lemma, while another may only discuss one or two, or may merely provide a list of items that are considered the most common or most problematic. The number of separate entries for a usage problem like the one included in the HUGE database under the heading ‘foreign plurals’ illustrates this variation. To begin with, only just over half the usage guides address this usage problem ( out of the  titles in the database). In the usage guides that do discuss foreign plurals, the number of entries varies from one, as in Usage and Abusage (Partridge [] ), , as for The A to Z of Correct English (Burt ), to as many as  in the Longman Guide to English Usage (Greenbaum and Whitcut ). The various ways of forming adjectives from nouns is another well-known usage problem in English. One of the ways to do so is to add either the suffix -ic or -ical. Many adjectives, however, can be formed with both suffixes, creating doublets as a result. Sometimes differentiation in meaning between the two forms occurred, as in the words historic and historical, with the first word meaning ‘memorable and important’ and the second ‘pertaining to history’.16 Other doublets, such as problematic and problematical, are virtually interchangeable in most contexts. Preference for one form or the other often depends on the variety of English spoken, or even merely on the speaker’s or writer’s personal style (see Kaunisto ). With respect to the -ic/-ical words, one usage guide may list them as individual lemmas, while another may only discuss the problem in general terms, provide a short list, or include only the more problematic instances. Of the guides that discuss this usage problem, the number of individual entries varies between only one, as in The King’s English (Amis ), or two, as in A.B.C. of English Usage (Treble and Vallins ), to as many as  items in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Gowers ).17 16

See e.g. the discussion of the two words in The Free Dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ historic). 17 This is a little more than the  entries in Fowler’s original  edition.

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Another example is the following one. In contemporary English, adverbs are typically formed from adjectives by adding the suffix -ly to the adjective. However, some adverbs occur without the suffix; these are known as ‘flat adverbs’ or ‘zero adverbs’ (see e.g. Peters ). With some, there is a difference in meaning between the two adverbial forms, as in I smell bad compared to I smell badly (Fogarty : ). With others, the adjectival and adverbial forms are more or less interchangeable, especially in informal contexts. An example is Kiss me quick vs. Kiss me quickly (Heffer : ). In the HUGE database, flat adverbs are represented by the usage problem slow/slowly, which is the prototypical example, taken from the traffic sign Go slow!. As with the previous examples, dual adverb pairs like this may be listed in usage guides as individual lemmas or may only be discussed in general terms, or we find a combination of both. Almost two-thirds of the usage guides discuss this usage problem ( out of  titles in the HUGE database). Of the guides that do so, the coverage once again varies between just a single one, as in Better English (Vallins [] ) and  separate entries in the Longman Guide to English Usage (Greenbaum and Whitcut ).18 Figure . provides an overview of what percentage of usage guides present a given number of entries for foreign plurals, -ic/-ical adjectives, and flat adverbs, respectively. These examples also show that it is not just the case that one guide is more comprehensive than another. Some authors seem to care more about being

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 1 entry 2 entries foreign plurals

3–10 entries

11–20 entries

21–30 entries

-ic/-ical adjectives

31–40 entries

flat adverbs

FIGURE .. Number of entries for foreign plurals, -ic/-ical, and flat adverbs in usage guides 18 For a discussion of attitudes to the use of flat adverbs in relation to their discussion in usage guides, see Lukač and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (forthc.).

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comprehensive with regard to some usage problems than with regard to others. For instance, The A to Z of Correct English (Burt ) has  entries on foreign plurals, two on the -ic/-ical problem, but none for flat adverbs. The reference-type guides especially seem to contain multiple entries for these usage problems. This brings us the question: how comprehensive are usage guides? .. Comprehensiveness It is difficult to say which of the usage guides in HUGE is the most comprehensive. Comprehensiveness is clearly dependent on the number of entries in a usage guide, but the number of individual usage problems discussed is relevant as well. We have seen in the three examples discussed in the previous section that, between various usage guides, a single usage problem can be dealt with in a greatly varying number of entries. I will use the information in the HUGE database to attempt an assessment of the comprehensiveness of the usage guides the database contains. The HUGE database includes  usage problems, but no usage guide in the database discusses all of them. Figure . shows the  usage guides that discuss the largest number of these usage problems (plotted on the horizontal axis) compared to the total number of entries (vertical axis) that the work in question has in the HUGE database. All of these were published after the middle of the twentieth century. The most comprehensive usage guides consequently appear in the top right-hand corner of the graph, which shows that the Longman Guide to English Usage (Greenbaum and Whitcut ), with  entries and  usage problems, is arguably the most comprehensive, although the largest number of usage problems in the HUGE database ( out of ) are discussed in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Burchfield  []).19 The least comprehensive usage guide is A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Horwill ), which covers only eight of the  usage problems in the HUGE database. Sometimes, certain entries in usage guides make you wonder to what extent the items discussed are actually problematic, and instead seem merely to inflate the size of the guide in an attempt to be or seem comprehensive. The three usage problems discussed here, the -ic/-ical adjectives in particular perhaps, are good examples of this kind of inflation. We may ask ourselves whether it is necessary or even useful to discuss all the instances under separate lemmas. This also raises the important question: to what extent is a certain usage problematic? When does it, in the author’s or editor’s perception anyway, need to be listed in a usage guide? Many entries in usage guides provide no more information than those in a regular dictionary. I will not go into this question here, since it is a complicated one that would require 19 It is useful to remember at this point that we don’t know exactly how many entries are contained in the usage guides described here, or in any of the guides in the HUGE database for that matter (cf. footnote ).

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280 Longman Guide to English Usage 1988 260

New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 1996

Dictionary of Modern American Usage 1998

240

220

Cambridge Guide to English Usage 2004

200

Dictionary of Modern English Usage 1965 Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage 1957 American Heritage Columbia Guide to Guide to Standard American English 1993 Comprehensive Contemporary Usage & Style 2005 Guide to Good

180

160

Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage 1999

Dictionary of Modern English Usage 1926

140

English 1927 Current English Usage 1962

120

Good English Guide 1993

100 70

75

80

85

Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 1989

Usage and Abusage 1947

90

95

100

105

110

115

FIGURE .. The fifteen most comprehensive usage guides in the HUGE database

considerable research outside the immediate area of investigation of this chapter, but I will note that many of the entries in quite a few of the usage guides fail to meet the three criteria that Robert Ilson drew up for what constitutes a usage problem: . it should be a problem; that is, something that people actually say, rather than something they’d never dream of saying; . it should involve an item that is of fairly wide distribution, not one that is felt to be limited to regional dialect; . its public discussion should not cause too much embarrassment. (Ilson : –) I do, however, think that, while many items in usage guides do not constitute real usage problems, Ilson’s criteria are too strict, or at least only applicable in a limited way to distinguish the real usage problems from the many ‘non-problems’ which

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clutter up, or ‘bloat’, many modern usage guides.20 At least one of the criteria must be that an item is a usage problem if users consider it to be problematic. Conversely, when something doesn’t seem to be considered problematic, when its use is agreed upon by most, we could question whether it needs to be in a usage guide at all. An example of this is the split infinitive, which is now commonly accepted as natural and correct English and need not really be discussed in modern usage guides.

. Conclusions In this chapter, I have explored the genre of the English usage guide and how it came to be what it is today: a genre with a considerable amount of popularity. I have traced its evolution from the late eighteenth century onwards, when it came into existence out of usage comments in the popular press of the time, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which the genre matured and became increasingly professional, to the early twenty-first century, where we find that it has divided itself in two subgenres: one serious and meant for reference, the other one much more loosely structured and meant to be read from cover to cover for entertainment as much as for instruction. It is useful to understand the history of usage advice and what kind of formal features are found in the various types of texts involved with it. Having an overview of who recommended what for whom and when allows us to better define what the usage guide is. In the end, the usage guide is a practical genre that continues to evolve, and its authors produce guides that can be conservative or progressive, depending on what they think their audiences require or want.

20 Ilson himself was aware of this: ‘the three criteria for usage problems discussed so far . . . are really not so much reasons why some items become usage problems as reasons why other items do not. We may know why usage books don’t discuss bean’t. But why do they prefer isn’t to ain’t? Why, indeed, are there usage problems at all?’ (Ilson : )

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3 The lexicography of English usage Describing usage variation and change P AM P ET E RS

. Introduction: usage guides, dictionaries and lexicography In the long history of lexicography, the usage guide is very much a latter-day genre of writing about words, and the term itself dates from  (Oxford English Dictionary Online; OED). As a genre of publishing, the usage guide comes after dictionaries and thesauruses as the third type of reference on the English language (Nunberg a: –). Usage guides overlap with both in their content, since they are concerned with relationships of form and meaning among words. They overlap also with a fourth type of language reference, the style manual, in covering matters of spelling and punctuation. The usage guide is thus a hybrid in terms of content, as well as in its partial and highly selective treatment of lexical, grammatical, and orthographic topics. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive coverage of English lexicogrammar, or the formalities of the English writing system. The modern usage guide diverges from the dictionary in its use of the conventional microstructure for individual entries. In dictionaries the format of these entries is systematic, designed to provide comparable information about all the words included. Such variability as there is in the length of entries correlates with the level of polysemy and range of idioms and collocations to be registered, i.e. lexical properties of the words themselves. The dictionary’s presentation of information is expository, intended to reflect the facts of language, not the author’s particular interests. But usage guides since Fowler (see Straaijer, Chapter  in this volume) have adopted the alphabetic format to house their discursive approach to usage questions in shorter and longer essays. The authors of usage guides are usually named, and often attempt to offer definitive positioning on usage controversies (Nunberg a: ), whether as educators or adjudicators. The language material and contextual information in usage guides varies with the role assumed by the author (descriptive or prescriptive), and his/her interest in particular linguistic topics. English Usage Guides. First edition. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.) This chapter © Pam Peters . First published  by Oxford University Press.

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The resources available to dictionary-makers for lexical description—lexicography— have greatly increased since the s, with the creation of very large computer corpora such as the British National Corpus. They provide empirical information about how words and phrases are used in different types of discourse, and about their variability in spoken and written usage. While major dictionary publishers have embraced the use of corpora as empirical sources for lexicography, corpora remain under-utilized in the lexicography of usage guides. This probably reflects the usage guide’s often intuitive and subjective position on usage, focusing on wordings it deems accepted, rather than on what is commonly used (Peters : –). The scope for fuller use of corpus evidence in the lexicography of usage, and in describing usage variation and change, is the focus of this chapter.

. The usage writing tradition in the twentieth century Modern critical writing on English usage can be traced back to the eighteenth century in the commentaries of early grammarians (Tieken-Boon van Ostade , b) and their successors in the nineteenth (Anderwald ). The scope of usage writing expanded with independent usage manuals in the early twentieth century, pioneered in discursive works by Fowler and Fowler in The King’s English () in the UK, and by Hall () in the US. On both sides of the Atlantic, they were written to satisfy needs in contemporary language education, hence the magisterial positioning of the authors. Other characteristics of traditional usage guides include: conservative language preferences, synchronic assumptions about language, authority vested in individual or collective authorship, variable uses of language evidence. These I will go into separately in what follows. .. Conservative language preferences Formal and literary language were the mainstay of citations in Johnson’s Dictionary (), and continued to dominate in the first edition of the OED (Willinsky ). Citations from named and published authors no doubt lent authority which other (often nameless) professional writers on everyday practical topics lacked. While Fowler () himself made considerable use of unsourced newspaper extracts, as often as not they served to illustrate ‘blunders’ (see negatives); ‘mistakes’, ‘wrong examples’ (see number); or inexcusable illogicalities for which ‘the modern newspaper man must not expect pardon’ (: ). He distanced himself from everyday, colloquial forms of expression, dubbed ‘vulgar’ in the older sense of the word (i.e. ‘popular’). In Gowers’s second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (), almost all Fowler’s original discussion was retained, and his stylistic preferences were thus perpetuated well into the second half of twentieth century. At the same time conservative usage writers in the US, such as Follett (), whetted public

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criticism against the newly launched Webster’s Third International Dictionary (), with its inclusive approach to spoken American usage (Morton ). Echoes of this prejudice against broadly based accounts of English usage could still be found among US editors (such as those at Atlantic Monthly) who continued to refer to Webster’s Second (rather than Webster’s Third) for another fifty years (Norris ). The yardstick for traditional usage writing has continued to be conservative and selective, ensuring that usage writers and their consumers have been disinclined to recognize variation and ongoing change in contemporary usage. .. Synchronic assumption: the infinite present Traditional usage writers position their discussion and evaluation of English expressions as if the language is in a state of suspended animation, without any suggestion of the processes of change inherent in it. Language change doesn’t happen overnight, but rather through a longish process of interplay between alternatives over time that make it less obvious. The gradual take-up of an innovation can be modelled in terms of a stretched-out S-curve, as shown in Figure ., following Labov (: ). What begins as the minor variant develops over the course of time into the major variant as the S-curve reaches the top-right corner. The diagram also shows the changing take-up rates for a language innovation to be adopted by the speech community: over time the pace is slow–quick–quick–slow (Aitchison : ). The changeable ratio between the two variants is a symptom of language change at any point in time, but traditional usage books either avoid discussing it or simplify things by prescribing the preferred alternative and proscribing the other. They usually pay little attention to spoken/written variability, and tend to invoke quasi-timeless notions of ‘standard English’ or ‘good usage’ without reference to context or medium of communication. 100 90 80 Increment

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 time

10 11 12 13 14 15

FIGURE .. S-curve of language change

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They thus support and perpetuate the ‘ideology of the standard’ (Armstrong and Mackenzie ). .. Authority in individual or collective authorship Many traditional usage books are written on the assumption that their author’s credentials give them ipse dixit authority to discuss and evaluate usage. Part of this authority might come from their positions as a cleric (Lowth’s grammar: ‘the bishop’s grammar’; see, however, Tieken-Boon van Ostade b), from classroom teaching (Fowler and Fowler ), or from in-house instruction of journalists and editors (Bernstein, The Careful Writer ). Occasionally the individual viewpoint was questioned, as when publication of The Queen’s English () by Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, was very publicly criticized in The Dean’s English (Moon ). Yet most usage writers felt free to express their own views without reference to others, hence the remarkably diverse range of decisions found in grammars of the nineteenth century (Anderwald ) and in the later twentieth (Peters and Young ). The need to consider more broadly based views as the basis of authority on usage was recognized by The American Heritage Dictionary (), in constructing in-house usage panels out of more than  ‘readers’ for successive editions of the dictionary. The panel’s members were predominantly well-known writers of fiction and nonfiction with little expertise in language, and usage issues were a matter of ‘etiquette’, as Nunberg (b: ) puts it. The form of the usage questionnaire put to the panel members would have predisposed them to express status quo judgements (Creswell : –), so that the questionnaire did not serve to document diversity, let alone incipient change in the American speech community. A more transparent approach to widening the base of opinion on usage matters was attempted in Copperud’s two editions of The Consensus (, ), which aimed to identify convergences among a selection of usage guides written by his contemporaries. But the hoped-for synthesis was limited by Copperud’s dependence on the ‘subjective moralizing and prejudice’ of his source material (Algeo : ). Both these attempts to establish collective authority were thus thwarted by methodological problems, especially the assumption that expressed opinion is the measure of acceptability in usage. As David Foster Wallace (: ) quipped: ‘It is […] easier to be Dogmatic than Democratic.’ Meanwhile the raw material of usage—language use itself—was under-utilized as the basis of authority in later twentieth-century usage books. .. Language evidence and uses of it Examples of language usage are often discussed in usage guides, but the books’ sourcing and the ways in which they are used vary considerably. Some usage writers create examples to embody their preferences/dispreferences; others quote exemplary citations from independent sources to support an argumentative point. While the

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first method is common in pedagogical texts, the second is scholarly practice in the humanities. Scholars and usage writers may then make deductive or inductive use of their exemplary evidence: deductively, to support an a priori judgement; or inductively, as the input to forming a proposition. Reliable judgements on usage are based on the evidence provided (Weiner ), though this begs the question as to what counts as reliable (or sufficient) evidence for a particular usage issue. In the original OED approach to lexicography, meanings and changes in meaning were induced from a series of citations gathered for the dictionary by volunteer readers from published literary writing over time (see e.g. Willinsky ). The outstanding usage guide of the latter twentieth century is Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Gilman ), which also made inductive use of citations collected for the dictionary’s publisher (Merriam-Webster). Other usage writers, such as Burchfield (), worked deductively with their citations, using them to document their prior judgements about correctness in usage. Whether used inductively or deductively, the pool of citations was limited. With the growth of electronic media, access to citational raw material in published corpora and databases as well as on the internet has vastly increased, supporting inductive use of it in describing major and minor usages. Such access is limited only by the usage writer’s methods for sampling the material, and the ability to categorize the sources in terms of their region and register. The data support finer-grained discriminations between formal and informal styles across of the English-speaking world, as discussed in section ...

. New developments in the lexicography of usage in the early twenty-first century With the turn of the millennium, it’s time to consider how contemporary usage writers may position themselves and make use of new technology in the lexicography of usage. Two important innovations suggest themselves, both originating in the US. One is a novel schema for recognizing language variation and change in the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage (), the other the recently completed GloWbE multibillion word corpus of twenty world Englishes, compiled at Brigham Young University, Utah. The effectiveness of the corpus data will be explored in relation to questions of usage surrounding the assimilation of Latin loanwords in twenty-first-century English, in sections . and .. .. Garner’s Modern American Usage (third edition, ) Previous editions of Garner’s Modern American Usage (, )1 simply echoed the title of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (), as did quite a few other American 1 Garner’s th edn of Modern American Usage, called Garner’s Modern English Usage (), came out too late to be used for this analysis.

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usage guides from the twentieth century. Garner’s third edition breaks out of the channel by foregrounding his name in the title, projecting him as the authority on American usage in the ipse dixit tradition. But Garner continues to provide large numbers of citations in this edition, drawn especially from the Westlaw and Nexis databases, though relatively few have been added to those contained in previous editions. They are, however, much more spaciously formatted—no longer run-on, but each one starting on a separate line, as in Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Gilman ), to encourage closer reading in relation to the discursive commentary provided. Overall the commentary within entries has changed little, apart from the use of asterisks to mark the alternative headword form which is ‘invariably inferior’, e.g. backwardation; backadation*, capitulatory; capitulative*. As applied to obscure words from legal sources, they are of rather doubtful value to the common reader (Kaunisto ). .. Garner’s Language-Change Index (LCI) The most remarkable innovation in Garner’s third edition is his model of the progression of language changes—not by chronological analysis of datable examples of usage, but analogically, in terms of their status within the American speech community. As set out in the expanded introduction (: xxxv, liv–lvii), Garner conceives of language or usage change in terms of five stages, from being a novelty to becoming universally accepted, as shown in Table . (see also Smits ). Although he speaks of separating earlier and later citations taken from previous studies and various contemporary databases, the LCI doesn’t provide any time references to show whether language changes take place over a longer or shorter period. Table . projects the notional stages as equal in time, though the evolutionary stages for individual usage variables would naturally vary in length. Changes to word senses are more readily taken up by the community than changes in form, as found by Ayto (: ). But when Garner, as represented in Table ., refers to ‘the [new] form’, he presumably includes changes in meaning as well as the form of usage items. The variability of usage in different registers of communication, e.g. written vs. spoken TABLE .. Garner’s Language Change Index (LCI) Stage 

A new form emerges as an innovation among a small population of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.

Stage 

The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage.

Stage 

The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage.

Stage 

The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (die-hard snoots).

Stage 

The form is universally accepted (not counting pseudo-snoot eccentrics).

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language, is not recognized in the LCI; nor is the likelihood that changes may be more and less advanced at any stage in different genres (e.g. fiction vs. nonfiction). With Garner’s emphasis on ‘good writing’, and with most citations being drawn from published sources, the unstated norms of acceptability would be those of edited written language. As defined in Table ., the five stages of the LCI are all associated with notional communities of different sizes, defined impressionistically. The innovation begins in ‘a small population’, then takes up ‘a significant fraction’, then becomes ‘commonplace among many well-educated people’, and moves on rapidly to being ‘virtually universal’ and finally to being ‘universally [used]’. These broadly quantitative terms could be seen as paralleling the minor-to-major growth rates of an incoming usage, as graphed on the left-hand side of the linguists’ S-curve (cf. Figure .). But the community of the non-innovators on the right-hand side of the curve is less consistently represented in Garner’s LCI. There it starts as the implied very large or larger part of the language community (Stages  and ), who share an understanding of what is ‘standard usage’. But in Stage  the non-innovators become a subset of the well-educated community who adhere to ‘careful usage’—and what the less well-educated are doing at this stage is passed over in silence. By Stage , the minority usage community has shrunk to the ‘linguistic stalwarts’ or ‘die-hard snoots’, then becomes discredited as ‘pseudo-snoot eccentrics’ in Stage —if readers take the word snoot in its ordinary sense of ‘snob’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary online). This ad hoc and value-laden construction of the speech community on the right of the S-curve is thus disconnected from the neutral, quantitatively conceived one on the left. Garner’s struggle with the connotations of words to describe the usage elite is evident in his carefully worded account of snoot in the entry for it, added to the third edition. There he explains that it is Wallace’s () non-pejorative word for people otherwise referred to as ‘grammar nazis, usage nerds or syntax snobs’. Garner’s quest for such a word also finds expression in the idiosyncratic term ‘garlic hangers’, used in the title of the essay also added to the third edition, in which he takes arms against linguistics in a reductionist account of its emphasis on description. Meanwhile, the latter stages of the LCI as defined in Table . project the ambivalence of his personal position on usage, as a ‘descriptive prescriber’ (Garner : xl, xliv). The LCI is applied to about one-fifth of the entries in Garner’s Modern American Usage, added by way of a summary line at the end of the entry, as in: LANGUAGE CHANGE INDEX he or she for he: Stage  LANGUAGE CHANGE INDEX *her’s for hers: Stage  The full set of stages is noted in summary form at the bottom of every page, and an explanation of the asterisk as marking ‘invariably inferior’ usage. With that a priori judgement, readers might wonder why any LCI stage is assigned to them at all. Editorial annotations added to some of the citations provided are shown in square

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brackets, again to show where the wording is deprecated and not to be taken as evidence of changing usage. Readers are more directly cautioned against using what Garner calls ‘skunked terms’, also given an entry in his guide. These are controversial uses of words like data as mass noun and enormity in the sense of ‘immensity’, where older and newer usages are still in play. Because they can polarize the audience, such usages are to be avoided by those ‘for whom credibility is important’. The durability of the stigma he attaches to such words is not discussed, but presumably factored into the LCI. Though Garner explains in general terms his methods and sources for deciding which LCI stage to assign to individual usages (: lv), it is less than transparent how most of them were arrived at. They represent degrees of social acceptability (cf. section ..), rather than the stage of assimilation which a new usage has reached within the language. .. Empirical models for the diffusion of language change Fresh descriptions of the processes of language change have been published since , embodying large-scale volumes of language data. One such is Lieberman et al.’s () mathematical framework for the regularization of  English irregular verbs since Anglo-Saxon times. It provides a long historical perspective on their overall attrition, showing the correlation between lower frequency and faster rates of regularization. This statistical relationship was noted earlier in small linguistic sets by cognitive linguists such as Bybee (, ). Historical evidence was also the base for the statistical model of language innovation developed for the spread of new morphosyntactic forms in Early Modern English, reported in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg () and Nevalainen et al. (). Using diachronic data from the Helsinki Corpus from the period –, the researchers mapped the diffusion of a set of morphosyntactic forms (e.g. the replacement of ye by you as subject) in the usage of letter-writers of differing social status (from Queen Elizabeth I down). The corpus data allowed them to quantify the take-up of innovations within the community of letter writers, by analysing them in sub-periods of about forty years, graphed over time. Most of the changes progressed according to the slow–quick–quick–slow pattern of an S-curve, to become embedded in modern English. The possibility of extending this diachronically referenced model to analyse synchronic variation in usage data was explored by Dant (), to facilitate her review of  recommendations of the Chicago Manual (th edn, ). To assess their status on the strength of evidence drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (see section ..), she needed to establish quantitative reference points for her own analysis. Table . shows her synthesis of both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the process of language change, showing how

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TABLE .. Stages of language innovation and change, following Dant () Garner ()

Labov () Biber et al. ()

Innovation of a variant More common but still unacceptable Commonplace but avoided by the careful Virtually universal, opposed by a few Universally adopted except by ‘eccentrics’

Incipient New and vigorous Mid-range

Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg ()