基本信息·出版社：Oxford University Press, USA ·页码：748 页 ·出版日期：1983年05月 ·ISBN：0192813897 ·条形码：9780192813893 ·版本：第2版 · ...
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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage |
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基本信息·出版社：Oxford University Press, USA
·页码：748 页
·出版日期：1983年05月
·ISBN：0192813897
·条形码：9780192813893
·版本：第2版
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·丛书名：The Oxford Library of English Usage ; V. 2
·外文书名：牛津福勒现代英语用法词典
内容简介 A standard reference work throughout the English-speaking world, this work is remarkable not only for the completeness of its information but for the wit and common sense with which it has been compiled.
作者简介 Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) was a translator, lexicographer, and grammarian. With his brother Frank (1870-1918) he compiled the first edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (published 1911) and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (published in 1924, after Franks' death). Frank helped to plan Modern English Usage with his brother but he died before it was published and it was executed by Henry alone. The name Fowler has become synonymous with reliable and accurate reference on all
aspects of written English.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 编辑推荐 A guide to precise phrases, grammar, and pronunciation can be key; it can even be admired. But beloved? Yet from its first appearance in 1926,
Fowler's was just that. Henry Watson Fowler initially aimed his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage, as he wrote to his publishers in 1911, at "the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities who wants to know Can I say so-&-so?" He was of course obsessed with, in Swift's phrase, "proper words in their proper places." But having been a schoolmaster, Fowler knew that liberal doses of style, wit, and caprice would keep his manual off the shelf and in writers' hands. He also felt that description must accompany prescription, and that advocating pedantic "superstitions" and "fetishes" would be to no one's advantage. Adepts will have their favorite inconsequential entries--from
burgle to
brood,
truffle to
turgid. Would that we could quote them all, but we can't resist a couple. Here Fowler lays into
dedicated:
He is that rara avis a dedicated boxer. The sporting correspondent who wrote this evidently does not see why the literary critics should have a monopoly of this favourite word of theirs, though he does not seem to think that it will be greatly needed in his branch of the business.
Needless to say, later on
rara avis is also smacked upside the head! And
practically fares no better: "It is unfortunate that
practically should have escaped from its true meaning into something like its opposite," Fowler begins. But our linguistic hero also knew full well when to put a crimp on comedy. Some phrases and proper uses, it's clear, would always be worth fighting for, and the guide thus ranges from brief definitions to involved articles.
Archaisms, for instance, he considered safe only in the hands of the experienced, and meaningless words, especially those used by the young, "are perhaps more suitable for the psychologist than for the philologist." Well, youth might respond, "Whatever!"--though only after examining the keen differences between that phrase and
what ever. (One can only imagine what Fowler would have made of our late-20th-century abuses of
like.) This is where Robert Burchfield's 1996 third edition comes in. Yes, Fowler lost the fight for one
r in
guerrilla and didn't fare too well when it came to quashing such vogue words as
smear and
seminal. But he knew--and makes us ever aware--that language is a living, breathing (and occasionally suffocating) thing, and we hope that he would have welcomed any and all revisions. Fowlerphiles will want to keep their first (if they're very lucky) or second editions at hand, but should look to Burchfield for new entries on such phrases as
gay,
iron curtain, and
inchoate--not to mention
girl.
--Kerry Fried
