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RR 2016/050 Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th edition) Edited by Jeremy Butterfield Oxford University Press Oxford 2015 xviii + 901 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 966135 0 £25 $39.95
Keywords Dictionaries, English language
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-10-2015-0249
Any reader over 50 years of age with a traditional British education may find this fourth edition of Fowler's an uncomfortable read at times. Many of our favourite bêtes noires are now considered to be acceptable by this font (or fount) of wisdom, and those prescriptivists who still fret about them are exposed on numerous occasions as outdated pedants. The key of course is that language changes, and this is a dictionary of usage, based on "the unparalleled resource of the Oxford English Corpus", which contains over 2.5 billion words collected in the twenty-first century from sources from throughout the English-speaking world.
A prime example is Decimate, which once meant "to remove one in ten", but now the usage of "to remove a large proportion" is deemed acceptable. Outraged of Nethy Bridge will get little sympathy from the editor, Jeremy Butterfield, who in the entry for Avail, advises: "Purists can make up their own minds whether to follow the trend or stick...