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The New Fowler's Modern English Usage
National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by James Bowman
AS it happened, I read much of this book on an airplane (BrE "aeroplane") operated by Delta, whose uniformed representative welcomed me, among the other passengers, with the portentous announcement that she was Lisa and she would be my "customer service coordinator." As something of a collector of "genteelisms" and "euphemisms" (qqv), I at once sought under the appropriate entries to see if Mr. Burchfield, who is a lexicographer by trade, had caught this latest specimen, with the dew still moist upon its wings. He had not, quite, although he notes as an example under "euphemism" that the chief steward on an aircraft is sometimes called a "flight service director," which is close enough. Indeed, it is impressive in view of the rapid change that such a book must take account of. Next week Delta will doubtless be calling its chief stewards "customer service coordination directors."
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Interesting as many of the entries are, however, Burchfield has the modern lexicographer's undiscriminating respect for change when what is wanted in a usage manual is something more along the lines of an Old Testament prophet, pronouncing anathemas upon barbarous, inelegant, imprecise, and illogical constructions. Somehow such an attitude has seemed to most writers on the subject, since H. W. Fowler published the first Modern English Usage in 1926, inconsistent with the disinterested gravity of the scientist, to which they have aspired. The scholar, it is thought, must stand back from the historical processes constantly transforming the language -- even to the point of refusing to protest when the above sense of "disinterested" is gradually eroded by a merely ignorant preference for the meaning "uninterested."
On "disinterested" Burchfield concludes by saying merely that "my personal use and recommendation is to restrict 'disinterested' to its sense of 'impartial,' at any rate for the present." What remains unclear is why his personal use and recommendation should be so fastidious when he has shown us so many examples of the vulgar usage and when he has established no general principle (such as that discrete meanings must not be lost) by which that usage could be rejected. The normative approach to matters of usage, a legacy of the moralistic Victorians (whose last and most influential representative Fowler was), is always implicit, but it has nothing more to support it than personal preferences.
Arguments over grammar and usage are always at least as much about social as about linguistic distinctions. Always implicit is the question of what you are if, for example, you do not use the possessive with the gerund, or you confuse "flout" with "flaunt." We fear that the answer to that question is that we are ignorant, crude, boorish, uncultivated, and, hence, lower-class -- which, I take it, is why the tactful Mr. Burchfield not only refuses to answer it but often refuses to pose it. "Flout" for "flaunt," it's true, he labels "incorrect," but for the most part he does not stigmatize non-standard forms as "barbarisms" or "uneducated" -- or even, always, non-standard. More typical is his description of the failure to use the possessive with the gerund (as in "him failing to use" instead of "his failing to use"), which he describes as "less formal."
This seems to me like calling a road apple "less formal" than a profiterole. The abolition of linguistic stigmas (this form is preferred to "stigmata" in rare instances of plurals in the figurative sense of imputation or disgrace) is like the action of progressive-minded city councils in proclaiming themselves "nuclear free zones." Neither nuclear missiles nor social discrimination will consequently go away, but some people will feel better about themselves on account of the fervency of their desire that such things should go away. Meanwhile, the educated are expected to display such exquisite delicacy as to forbear in all cases and at whatever cost in elegance or precision to point out the ignorance or stupidity of the non-standard writer or speaker. In Burchfield's world it is all right to know the old rules (and most of them he sets out under their appropriate entries), just so long as we pretend that we don't know or care much about them.
Consider, for example, "literally." Using the word as a mere intensifier -- as in the comical phrase I once read in an opera libretto: "with their eyes literally glued to the wall" -- is as self-evidently erroneous as it is possible to be. Burchfield cannot ignore this. But he proceeds to note that the erroneous usage is a "weakened sense" of the word and provides a string of examples of its misuse from Fanny Kemble, Vladimir Nabokov, and a bunch of journalists. "It's a case," he concludes, "of 'stop, look, and think' before using the word in any manner short of its exact sense." Is this a polite or inoffensive way of saying that we shouldn't use it in its inexact (sc. erroneous) sense? Or is it merely the deprecatory tic of the progressive parent, nervous of appearing authoritarian, who concludes a talk to his teenager about drugs or sex with a limp admonition to think before he acts?
