&quotMR. FOWLER, HE LIVE”;

I was an unlikely recruit to this movement. I grew up without the least knowledge of grammar; the rules of punctuation were as clear to me as Mandarin Chinese. As a student who aspired merely to acceptable mediocrity, I wrote defensively, trying chiefly to avoid embarrassing myself, which I’m sure I didn’t always succeed in doing. So how did it come about that I enlisted as a career soldier — a warrant officer, perhaps — in this second greatest of lost causes?

My interest in careful English followed my decision to become a writer, a decision that gave me a selfish stake in the English language, in keeping it clear and vivid and anchored in stable meaning. Hindus, I have somewhere read, feel that they must respect the earth, because, given the arrangements of reincarnation, they are likely to inhabit it again in who can be sure what other form.

We writers, with our preposterous hopes that our works will survive us, are in something of the same condition. Of what value can these works be if the very words out of which they are composed no longer have anything resembling solidity of meaning? To give but a small inkling of what I mean, poor A. J. Liebling wrote that his politics were “Let Paris be gay,” a once lilting remark that nowadays requires a footnote stipulating that he didn’t really mean that sort of “gay.”

One of the side benefits of trying to save the language is that you’re never out of work. The English language is one vast San Andreas fault, where things are slipping and sliding every moment. The New York Times reports that a new publication called Icon considers itself a “thoughtstyle” magazine. (Icon is itself something of a misnomer.) Publishers Weekly mentions a new book titled Brainstyles. I have always thought “lifestyle,” the sire of these hideous phrases, a pretty frightful bastard in its own right, but I had no idea it would bring such even more hideous children into the world. The moral is clear: Give “em a finger and pretty soon they want the entire left side of your brain.

I think my passion for the correct use of language began when I first read Evelyn Waugh, whose novels demonstrate what precision can do for prose style. Simple correctness — with every word having the fine trimness of exact meaning — settles gravity on even Waugh’s wildest comic scenes. How, I wondered, did one acquire the skill of using words in this way? The answer seems to be to use words to say what they mean — but exactly what they mean, nothing loose or wobbly, no small tiles out of place, no loose grouting or bubbly caulk.

I might have been a little less insane on this subject if I had not begun teaching at a university 23 years ago. My students, many of them very smart and keen in all other sorts of ways, have tended to treat language as if it were a game of horseshoes, in which one is expected to get points for being close to the stake. Close might include using apprise when appraise is wanted, or surplice when the word surplus is required. (Thanks a lot, Spell Check.) They are, my students, insufficiently impressed with the distinctions between such words as jealousy and envy, eager and anxious, brutal and cruel.

When students talk about characters in Conrad, James, or Dostoyevsky as being “caring” and “special,” or refer to Anna Karenina’s “mid-life crisis,” I find myself fighting off the intellectual equivalent of a minor stroke. The little dears stimulated me, ill-educated as I myself was, to a high and, I hope, quite proper dudgeon.

In a course with the title “Fundamentals of Prose Style” offered to would- be novelists, essayists, and poets, I introduce two sentences that between them contain five errors:

Hopefully, the professor will not be altogether disinterested in the work on which I am presently engaged, which I believe is rather unique. But then everyone has their hopes.

My students have had a tough time finding the errors. They find instead several others that aren’t there. Or if they succeed, they aren’t sure just why they are errors. (“I remember one of my teachers in high school saying never to use ‘hopefully,’ but I don’t remember exactly why.”) Occasionally, a student will recognize that “disinterested” isn’t the same as “uninterested.” Rare is the kid who knows that “presently” isn’t a synonym for “currently.” I often have to point out that uniqueness represents an absolute condition, and that being “rather unique” is akin to being “rather pregnant” — either you are or you aren’t. Finally, I usually have to inform the class that “everyone, ” like “anybody” and “everybody” and “none,” takes the singular pronoun “he” or “she,” or “he or she.”

After putting students through this little torture, the first effect of which seems to be to discourage them about their own high valuation of themselves as users of the English language, I ask what difference any of it makes. The problem, certainly, isn’t one of clarity, for the meaning of the two sentences, even with their five errors, is perfectly clear. The problem, I assert, is that of offending the educated — of looking a fool in the eyes of those who know better. The educated are a most touchy minority group, perhaps an endangered species, but there are still a few of them out there. But my chief point is that the best writers — rather like the best people — don’t make such mistakes and that in making them one risks incurring distrust in all else one writes.

One of the difficulties — and simultaneously one of the glories — -of English is that it is less rule-bound than other languages. In French, much syntax is prescribed, set out in stone, while in English every sentence is essentially a do-it-yourself kit. G. V. Carey, author of a slender volume called Mind the Stop, notes that punctuation is one-third governed by rule and two-thirds by art.

From where does the authority for such pronunciamentos derive? Chiefly, from tradition and from writers who have stepped forth — as they have done at least since the time of Jonathan Swift — to complain about the corruption of the language. Samuel Johnson, with the authority of being the great lexicographer of his age, was an early entrant into the field. William Hazlitt was another. Orwell got in his innings with “Politics and the English Language,” and was always sensitive to the uses to which language could be put in the hands of tyrants and lesser con men. Edmund Wilson made it a habit to correct errors in the letters of his correspondents. In our day, the critic John Simon always takes a moment out to remark on solecisms in plays, movies, and books; he is a man who can find a grammatical error in a stop sign.

Even though much of the defense of careful language is handed down by tradition, less than one might expect is encoded in books. Many people think that The Elements of Style, the pamphlet by William Strunk that E. B. White edited and added to in the 1960s, is a key book here. I have myself always thought Strunk & White, as the book is popularly known, sensible but overrated. Useful as far as it goes — telling its readers, for example, not to worry overmuch about the question of when to use that or which, but generally to use that except where it seems patently wrong to do so — The Elements of Style does not go anywhere near far enough. Too much on which one wants help is not included.

Something similar might be said about The Complete Plain Words, a book compounded of two earlier books (Plain Words and The ABC of Plain Words) by Sir Ernest Gowers. Gowers was a remarkable English civil servant, and The Complete Plain Words was originally written, at the behest of the English Treasury, to improve the clarity of communication by military men, local government officials, and the staffs of such public bodies as the railroads. It is a good book for its purpose, but that purpose, too, is rather restricted.

Style, by F. L. Lucas, is a splendid, too little known, and now out-of- print work on the subject of its title. Lucas, a Cambridge don very much in the English belletristic line, was a brilliant critic with considerable classical learning. “Our subject, then,” he writes in Style, “is simply the effective use of language, especially in prose, whether to make statements or arouse emotions. It involves, first of all, the power to put facts with clarity and brevity; but facts are none the worse for being put with as much grace and interest as the subject allows.” Excellent though it is, Style is really a book for pure writers, for would-be literary artists who already bring a fair amount of learning and cultivation to the task, a book that goes beyond the fundamental matters of correctness, lucidity, and force in the deployment of language and into the aesthetics of Style, the dear, deadly little art of how to do it.

The great book in this line — great because both most helpful and intrinsically most interesting — remains Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler, first published in 1926. Fowler (1858-1933) was one of those extraordinary people that only the England of a certain time could produce. A late bloomer, Fowler had first to fail (at least by his own lights) as a schoolteacher, a journalist, an essayist, and a scholarly editor before he found his true calling as lexicographer. He was a man of strong character and unassailable honor: He resigned from teaching because, not a professing Christian, he felt he could not in good conscience get students ready for confirmation; he returned journalist fees when his work wasn’t printed; he enlisted in the English army during World War I at the age of 57 and resented not being sent to the front. When he turned to lexicography, he first worked with his brother Frank on a book titled The King’s English (1906); and the brothers then turned out The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911). Frank Fowler died in 1918.

H. W. Fowler had it in mind to produce a book that would deal exclusively with those idioms and other problematic aspects of language that exist in a condition of hazy understanding in the minds of even highly intelligent men and women. Oxford University Press viewed the project with the utmost dubiety. One reader’s report called it “A Utopian dictionary [that] would sell very well — in Utopia.”

As it turned out, Fowler’s book went through four printings in the year it was released and is said to have sold 55,000 copies in the United States that year. That such a work, a mixture of dictionary and encyclopedia that is fairly technical in its approaches to its subject, could become a bestseller suggests a much greater concern among Americans of the 1920s about using careful English than is now the case. A goodly number of Fowler’s entries had to do with correct pronunciation. To be grammatical, lucid, well-spoken generally was still, in the 1920s, a sign of good breeding, and hence of social acceptability.

What has made Modern English Usage so distinctive is that, with the possible exception of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, no other reference work has ever been so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of a single man. Fowler’s authority came from within; his confidence in his good sense was supreme, and — a crucial point — not at all misplaced. His is a work filled with its author’s idiosyncrasy, or “peculiar mixture,” as Fowler himself defined the word in Modern English Usage.

Fowler has the reputation of a rigid authoritarian, a frigid schoolmaster, a late-Victorian prude, another English stiffo. But, as anyone who has ever rambled through Modern English Usage knows, he was a very witty man, splendidly flexible, most of whose views were based not on unbending rules but on solid good sense. The old boy was even, in his day, something of a radical. Consider his chapter “Split Infinitive,” and recall that a split infinitive used to be considered an unshakeable violation. Fowler writes:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who do know & condemn; (4) those who know and approve; & (5) those who know and distinguish.

He says of the first category, “Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, & are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes; “to really understand” comes readier to their lips & pens than ” really to understand,” they see no reason why they should not say it . . . & they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.”

Fowler concludes with the perfectly sensible judgment that it is best to avoid splitting infinitives wherever possible, but better split them than be forced into saying or writing anything ambiguous, artificial, or otherwise foolish.

“Sturdy Indefensibles,” the title Fowler gave his chapter on ungrammatical (“It’s me”) or illogical (“It should not be taken too literally”) idioms, strikes the note of common sense even more clarionly:

Many idioms are seen, if they are tested by grammar or logic, to express badly, sometimes even to express the reverse of, what they are nevertheless well understood to mean. Good people point out the sin, & bad people, who are more numerous, take little notice & go on committing it; then the good people, if they are foolish, get excited & talk of ignorance & solecisms, & are laughed at as purists; or, if they are wise, say no more about it & wait. The indefensibles, sturdy as they may be, prove one after another to be not immortal.

For “those who know and distinguish” — or, better, for “those who want to know and distinguish” — might stand as the epigraph, motto, and blurb of Modern English Usage.

The very name “Fowler” is of such value that Oxford University Press commissioned two new editions of Modern English Usage in the last 30 years, the first a lightish and respectful revision by Ernest Gowers in 1965. Now we have a second, much more substantial revision by R. W. Burchfield, who has been the chief editor of the Oxford English dictionaries and the editor of The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume V.

Burchfield’s book is orderly, sensible, filled with useful information. It is a book I am pleased to own and shall probably often consult. Yet it is not H. W. Fowler’s. It may be called The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, but Fowler’s spirit of playful seriousness is missing. For example, many of Fowler’s best entries are buried behind odd and utterly idiosyncratic titles: “Elegant Variation,” “Superiority,” Facetious Formations, Irrelevant Allusion, Stock Pathos, Out of the Frying Pan,” “Novelese,” “Incongruous Vocabulary, Wardour Street,” and many others. The title “Wardour Street” derives from a London road that contained many antique shops, and is about antique vocabulary choices: “anent, aught,” “howbeit,” “erstwhile,” et alia.

Missing as well is the philosophy upon which Modern English Usage rests. Fowler believed that language was all we really had to keep the perpetually shaky ship of civilization on something like an even keel. There wasn’t anything apocalyptical about Fowler, but he understood that only a small portion of humankind cared about language, and it was up to them to keep it in the best possible trim. Doing so, enlisting in this fine lost cause, his work implied, had the added virtue of being amusing.

Gowers, the editor of the second edition, understood this very well. He understood, too, that H. W. Fowler “was an emancipator from the fetters of the grammatical pedants that had bound us for so long.” He recognized that ” Fowler’s true place is among the first of the rebels rather than among the last of the die-hards.”

Burchfield has little of Gowers’s enthusiasm for their predecessor. “What I want to stress,” he writes, “is the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day,” and he adds that Fowler’s original version of Modern English Usage is “a fossil all the same, and an enduring monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”

Some of the animus Burchfield seems to bear toward Fowler may be the normal rivalrousness of authors of works on the same subject. Burchfield has dropped several of Fowler’s more famous entries, which, he writes, “no longer have their interest or appeal and are not preserved in this new edition. The material in them has been redistributed under much more transparent heads.”

In some of the entries in his edition, Burchfield argues with, and on occasion puts down, Fowler. The article “Didacticism,” for example, begins, ” Fowler (1926), in an elegant but now dated essay characteristic of his generation . . .” Of the word “critique,” he notes, “Fowler (1926) said of the noun, “there is some hope of its dying out,” but it continues in use. . . .” A fair amount of sniping of this sort plays through the book.

The real conflict between the two, Burchfield and Fowler, is that the former is descriptive, the latter prescriptive, in impulse. Burchfield wishes to record, Fowler to make distinctions. Descriptive lexicographers tend to go with the flow, to be content merely to report, to side in linguistic matters with the populace. Reviewing the great “hopefully” controversy, which broke out in a big way in the 1960s, Burchfield remarks that “The unofficial war rumbles on” and, after lucidly setting out the arguments on both sides, ends by noting “the resentment [over all this] that is unlikely to fade away before at least the end of the” century.

Perhaps a better example is found in Burchfield’s entry on “Intrigue,” where he gives a history of the changed meaning of the word. It originally had to do with tricking, cheating, and deceiving, used first in connection with dealings between nations and among politicians, then spread out to amorous intimacy, and, finally (in the 1890s), took a sharp turn to mean ” fascinated curiosity.” Burchfield writes: “The new sense flourished to the point that Fowler (1926) declared it to be a literary critics” word ‘of no merit whatever except that of unfamiliarity to the English reader.'” Burchfield then tells us what Fowler could not see — namely, that “the language shows an irrepressible liking for near-synonyms, and intrigue and intriguing in the new sense have found their way into acceptance, especially] in journalism and in domestic conversation.” In short, the people have spoken, so Fowler (1926) is beside the point

Burchfield is not without his own welcome opinions, biases, anger. He thinks “ironically,” generally misused to mean “oddly,” or “curiously,” or ” strangely,” pretty sloppy, though now “it seems to be settling down into standard use, dragging ironical and ironic behind it.” His position on ” decimate,” which originally meant to punish every tenth man and has now come to be practically synonymous with “devastate” or “destroy,” is finally to draw the line on using it also to mean merely to kill, as in “physically decimating a person.” This use, he writes, “is not recommended.” He can live with “ongoing,” but thinks “ongoing situation” a cliche “that signals a person’s linguistic impoverishment” and hence not to be borne. Elsewhere he writes: “The use of all right, or inability to see that there is anything wrong with alright, reveals one’s background, upbringing, education, etc., perhaps as much as any word in the language,” adding, “The sociological divide commands attention.”

No lexicographer can hope to keep up with all the oddities and misusages in a living language, so brisk is their traffic. Take the word “fun.” Burchfield does capture fun in its new use as a quasi-adjective — “fun thing, fun place, ” and the odious “fun couple.” His book has not come too late for “venue,” which once had a strictly legal meaning and now means any place where any event is scheduled to occur, so that one wonders if, in the singles bars of our day, an attentive eavesdropper might hear the utterance, “Your venue or mine?”

It did, perhaps, come too late to have an entry on “attitude,” as in ” Rodman has attitude, all right.” Nor does it catch the typical American sports broadcaster’s consistent misuse of differential, as in “the Sonics have come back from a differential of 18 points.” I wish he had devoted a small article to “literate,” a word that should mean nothing more than knowing how to read and write, but has now come to mean well educated and articulate, which is a bit preposterous.

Burchfield and Fowler do not always disagree, and I sometimes find myself disagreeing with both of them. Consider the difference — distinctly not the differential — between “each other” and “one another.” Neither man thinks it any big deal; each is willing to walk away from insisting on any important distinction between the two, which holds that “each other” is used when no more than two things are referred to, and “one another” when more than two things are.

I happen to like the distinction between “each other” and “one another”; always use it in speech and prose; and tend to think of others who observe it as careful writers and speakers. Why? Is this mere snobbery on my part? Do I like to think myself superior for knowing and observing a rule that even the experts seem to feel is superfluous? I hope not. I have a love of such small distinctions. It pleases me that there are two such phrases as each other and one another and that each has a particular use, place, meaning. I deeply dig the sweet orderliness of it.

This love for order does not mean I always achieve it myself. It has not prevented me from being corrected by readers on points of grammar, semantics, pretension. Some while ago I received a letter from a man asking me why I always claim that books are “entitled” when the simpler “titled” would do the job nicely. I’ve decided he is right and have dropped the former. Another reader tells me that she much enjoyed a piece of mine in THE WEEKLY STANDARD but adds that “there is a sisplaced modifier on page 34, in the sentence beginning “It was a smallpress edition. . . . “And, damn it, it turns out she was right. Then one learns that people have strange biases about language — strange but not all of them nutty. Kingsley Amis once said that the word ” workshop” — as in “poetry workshop” or “a workshop in self-esteem” — represents all that has gone wrong with the world since World War II, and he may have been onto something.

Where snobbery may come in is in my wishing to separate myself from the mass of my fellow scribblers by not using words that they have already exhausted. “Community,” it seems to me, is such a word: Whether you say ” Jewish community, gay community, artistic community,” or “homeless community,” none of it means a thing, for these communities don’t really exist as communities in the root sense of the word. “Experience” took a similar beating a few years ago. It seemed a perfectly okay word till it began showing up in advertising copy that urged you to “experience GM’s 2.9 interest rates,” or “Experience the St. Regis,” and restaurants began opening with such names as The Corned Beef Experience. Something similar is taking place with “driven” as a substitute for “motivated” — death by overuse. What happens to such words is that they lose their shape and meaning; they cease, as Virginia Woolf once said, “to absorb much truth.”

In a world filled with bunco artists — intellectual, political, and artistic — all that a person has to defend himself is careful scrutiny of language. By the imprecision, vacuity, and insipidity of their language shall we know them. But deceptive language is not limited to that which politicians, salesmen, and other hustlers use on us; there is also that language we use to deceive ourselves into believing we understand the world around us, our relationships, and indeed ourselves. We are all excellent at conning ourselves, and there is no greater aid to doing so than language loose from its moorings — language handed on from social science and strained through the psychobabble of the putatively educated classes.

Burchfield doesn’t think language has come loose from its moorings. “I refuse to be a pessimist,” he concludes his preface to The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. “I am sure that the English language is not collapsing — more severe changes have come about in the past centuries than any that have occurred in the twentieth century — and in the English language, used well, we still have, and will continue to have, a tool of extraordinary strength and flexibility.”

If Burchfield is a joyless optimist, Fowler comes closer to being a jolly pessimist. He knows the stakes are high. When we lose a word such as ” disinterest,” for example, we are likely to lose the quality of disinterest as well. Yet the pleasure Fowler took in his work is contagious. His book enlivens one’s spirit. Reading him, one feels happy.

Language will, of course, change in all sorts of odd and unpredictable ways, some among them wonderfully felicitous. But distinctions need to be made between words that are alive and useful and words that are wornout or empty to begin with. Not to make these distinctions is to watch our language march directly into a swamp from which it may not easily emerge without great bits of gunk all over it. H. W. Fowler felt it his place to cry out at the spectacle of language gone awry, and did so more sensibly and wittily than anyone before or since his time. That is why the first edition of Modern English Usage is likely to have a much longer life than R. W. Burchfield’s third edition.

Contributing Editor Joseph Epstein’s latest short story, “Don Juan Zimmerman,” appears in the January issue of Commentary.