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Time for a new (but not ‘New’) Fowler

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JeremyButterfield, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 901. Hardback £25, ISBN 978-0-19-966135-0

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2016

Robin Straaijer
Robin Straaijer*
Affiliation:
University of Leiden, The Netherlands
*
Email: r.straaijer@gmail.com
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Extract

Is English usage changing more rapidly than it was before? Judging by the decreasing time between editions of ‘Fowlers’ it would seem so: thirty-nine years between Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, from here on MEU1) and Gower's second edition (1965, from here on MEU2), and thirty-one years between the latter and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996, from here on NFMEU). This led Manfred Görlach to write in his review of NFMEU that ‘[t]imes change, and we (and usage) change with them. A new edition of Fowler's classic book is thus in order every thirty to forty years’ (Görlach, 1997).

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English Today , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 57 - 61
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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