Ben Yagoda is an old LH favorite (e.g., 2015, 2022), so I was delighted to see that last week’s New Yorker included an essay of his (archived) on H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It starts:
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he was unhappy that, in two places in the piece, an editor had changed the word “but” to “however.” He made his case for a page and a half, and concluded, “But is a hell of a good word and we shouldn’t high hat it. . . . In three letters it says a little of however, and also be that as it may, and also here’s something you weren’t expecting and a number of other phrases along that line.” He signed the memo “St. Fowler McKelway.”
The “Fowler” was a joking reference to Henry W. Fowler, who, though not a saint in the magazine’s corridors, was certainly a great authority when it came to matters of grammar and style. A few years earlier, Wolcott Gibbs, another editor, had put together an internal document for new members of the staff titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It was a numbered list of thirty-one strictures, and in the penultimate one Gibbs wrote, “Fowler’s English Usage is our reference book. But don’t be precious about it.”
The source of what Kenneth Tynan later called the magazine’s “Fowler fixation” was Harold Ross, who’d dreamed up the idea of The New Yorker and brought it into being in 1925. Fowler’s “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” was published the following year, and Ross seized on it enthusiastically. (The book is usually referred to as “Modern English Usage” or simply as “Fowler,” in the eponymous manner of Hoyle or Roget.) An E. B. White Notes and Comment piece from the late nineteen-forties shows just how strongly the editor continued to feel. Ross—unnamed, merely described as “a tall, parched man”—sees a copy of the book on the writer’s desk, picks it up, and thumbs through favorite passages. “ ‘Greatest collection of essays and opinions ever assembled between covers,’ he shouted, ‘including a truly masterful study of that and which,’ ” White recounted. “ ‘That’s the business that really fascinates me. . . . I got so excited once I had the pages photostatted.’ ” Thomas Kunkel, Ross’s biographer, reported that, from time to time, Ross would read the “that” and “which” entries for relaxation.
After a long passage on the book’s high status at the magazine, Yagoda turns to the origin of the book and its author:
“Modern English Usage” had a long and rather winding path to publication. “Another scheme that has attractions is that of an idiom dictionary—that is, one that would give only such words as are in sufficiently general use to have acquired numerous senses or constructions & consequently to be liable to misuse,” Fowler wrote, in his neat and confident hand, in a letter to R. W. Chapman, of the Oxford University Press, dated June 20, 1909. “We should assume a cheerful attitude of infallibility, & confine ourselves to present-day usage; for instance, we should give no quarter to masterful in the sense of masterly.”
Fowler’s command of usage was indeed masterly (“masterful,” to him, should mean imperious or strong-willed), but his origins were unprepossessing. He was born in 1858 and grew up southeast of London in Royal Tunbridge Wells, a spa town that his biographer, Jenny McMorris, describes as the “epitome of genteelness.” His father, Robert, was a Cambridge graduate and a schoolmaster who died in 1879, leaving a modest estate, of which Henry, the eldest of eight children, was an executor. At the time of his father’s death, Henry was a student at Balliol College, Oxford; perhaps because of his difficult family circumstances, his academic record wasn’t distinguished.
After Oxford, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a schoolmaster himself, teaching Latin, Greek, and English. […] In 1903, he decided to move from the capital to Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, where his younger brother Francis (Frank to family and friends) was living. The move pleased Fowler, not least because of the lovely setting it provided for his long-standing habit—begun when he was an undergraduate at Oxford—of running each morning to a convenient body of water and taking a vigorous swim.
Fowler’s “we” in his letter to Chapman wasn’t editorial, much less royal; it referred to Frank and himself. In 1903, the two had embarked on a translation of the Greek satirist Lucian for Oxford. They followed that with what Fowler described as “a sort of English composition manual, from the negative point of view, for journalists and amateur writers.” The book, titled “The King’s English,” was published in 1906 and was a success both in sales and in influence. It fell out of print in the nineteen-thirties, having been eclipsed by “Modern English Usage,” but it laid down many of the later book’s best-known judgments, including its defense of splitting infinitives and of ending sentences with prepositions, and its vigorous condemnation of what the brothers had termed “elegant variation.” This is the “cheap ornament,” still cherished by sportswriters, of clumsily inserting a synonym or a near-synonym to avoid repeating a word or a name. (“The fleet-footed second-sacker slugged a four-bagger.”) “The King’s English” also introduced the idea of using “that,” and never “which,” before defining clauses.
In subsequent letters to Chapman and his Oxford colleagues, Fowler—who, in 1908, surprised most of those who knew him by getting married, on his fiftieth birthday—refined the “idiom dictionary” idea. It would be, he wrote, a “glossary” that would encompass, “without making an unwieldy volume, the hard-worked words that form the staple of general talk & writing; their varieties of meaning, liabilities to misuse, difference from synonyms, right & wrong constructions, special collocations, & so forth.” He noted that the press’s immense Oxford English Dictionary, or O.E.D.—which at the time had reached only the letter “P”—was “very chary of pronouncements on the unidiomatic; we irresponsible nobodies should be both more courageous & more directly concerned in the matter.”
He has a good discussion of the book’s approach and idiosyncrasies; here’s a sample:
Boiled down, Fowler’s writing advice amounts to three principles. First, be mindful of the reactions and needs of the reader. Second, don’t use worn-out gimmicks (especially when you’re trying to be funny) or “hackneyed phrases.” Fowler doesn’t call these “clichés,” probably because the word came from French and was unusual enough at the time to violate his third, and most important, tenet: don’t show off. His conception of this vice was broad. He considered fancy words like “beverage” and “emporium” to be “pompous ornaments”; to write “individual” when you mean “person” is an “illiteracy.” He observed, “Those who run to long words are mainly the unskilful & tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, & bulk with force.”\
Nor could Fowler countenance people who insist on the original pronunciation of foreign words, like “van Gogh” or “Budapest,” rather than the way they are commonly said. “Display of superior knowledge,” he wrote, “is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth—greater, indeed.”
And there are splendid anecdotes, like this one about a letter E.B. White wrote to John Updike in 1960, rapping him over the knuckles for a use of punctuation disfavored by Fowler:
Sixteen years later, White looked over their old correspondence and wrote to Updike, apologetically, “My pedantic and petty queries and wrangles, mostly over punctuation, make me blush with shame. My only excuse is that Ross had died only two years before I bought your first manuscript and we were still under his aura and the absolute rule of ‘Fowler’s English Usage’—a book I still go back to, and am amused by, to this day.”
Read the whole thing, and if your appetite for Fowleriana is still unsated, try this 2009 post.
I don’t think I was previously aware of St. Clair McKelvey, and I am impressed to learn that he used _True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality_ as the title for an anthology of his New Yorker pieces. But I’m more intrigued by his first name. The other instance that came to mind was that of St. Clair Pinckney (1930-1999), a saxophonist who was in his prime a mainstay of James Brown’s band. But googling reveals that there are others, such as the Hon. St. Clair Smith, who was a justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court in the mid-Twentieth Century. Indeed, down in the Caribbean it turns out that the parliament (“House of Assembly”) of St. Vincent & the Grenadines currently includes both The Honourable St. Clair ‘Jimmy’ Prince (also a cabinet minister) and, with an extra silent “e,” Major the Honourable St. Claire Leacock (currently in opposition).
As a British-American surname, St. Clair is of course a variant of (and the etymon of) “Sinclair.” Which has also been used as a first name, e.g. Sinclair Lewis. But now I’m curious about the demographic distribution of the two-word saintly version as a first name since it has such a different visual vibe.
FWIW the U.S. has a fair number of toponyms of the form St. Clair Street, St. Clair County, etc., which I believe almost all refer back to Arthur St. Clair (1737?-1818). Whose father back in Scotland had apparently spelled the family name Sinclair.
By the way, I have to note that “But is a hell of a good word and we shouldn’t high hat it” is a perfect bit of interwar American prose; it could come straight out of Hammett or Hemingway.
Who knows whether St-Foo names started as surnames or Christian names? I guess St. Clair must have come from a surname; it seems odd to christen a boy with the name of a female saint (other than Mary, of course, if one is Catholic; and most St-Foos seem rather WASPish — anglophone ones at least; francophones not so much).
Wikipedia cautions that St George St George, 1st Baron St George is “Not to be confused with George St George, 1st Baron Saint George or St George Gore-St George.”
Oliver St. John Gogarty had a Catholic background.
it seems odd to christen a boy with the name of a female saint
The name Sinclair is derived from that of St. Clarus of Normandy. So, I suspect, was Clair Quilty.
Quilty was a Clare; I had mistakenly assumed Clair(e) was female and Clare male. I demand [topical politician] sort out this mess.
I would certainly like to know more about St. Foo, the patron saint of birthday candles, of computer scientists, and of casual dismissal.
There was also Bayfield, played by Hugh Grant.
St. George Tucker (1752-1827) was an important figure in the early development of American law, both as a judge and a legal scholar. But his name is very unusual (as contrasted with perfectly normal bare “George”) outside of his immediate family. And it started as a surname. Quoth wiki: “The name St. George had been in the family since his great-great-grandfather George Tucker married Frances St. George.” I assume family names with “St.” are likely to be of toponymic origin rather than reflecting a familial reputation for sanctity.
Clare of Assisi was the sidekick of Saint Francis and founder of the second Franciscan order, for nuns. In today’s English, the usual spelling of her name and that of her order (“Poor Clares”) is as given, but in different languages and at different times, just about every variation of Clair or Clara has been used. She probably chose her devotional name when she first entered a Benedictine convent to be similar to her lay name, Chiara (again with some uncertainly as to spelling).
FWIW, County Clare in Ireland may (or may not, there’s a rival theory) have taken its name from the once-powerful de Clare Anglo-Norman dynasty, but the family name de Clare is definitely linked to Clare in Suffolk. Which, however, is said to be “one of the few major settlement names in East Anglia of unknown etymology.” According to this piece, which advances an admittedly unproven hypothesis that does not involve any direct linkage to Sanctus Clarus. https://keithbriggs.info/documents/clare_03.pdf
The closest German has to offer to this phenomenon are the very few people named Petrus (instead of Peter).
When I first came to the US I was wholly unaware, as I imagine most Brits are, of the sin of putting ‘which’ before a defining clause, and was surprised when it was changed to ‘that’ in something I’d written. I wondered where the idea came from, and after a bit of hunting around came across the explanation in an old edition of Fowler.
And I thought, they just made it up because it seemed like a good idea? I had been expecting something more substantial and authoritative.
On the more than 1100 people bearing the given name St. Clair or St. Claire see here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=st.+clair&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=&locationId=&bio=&linkedToName=&plot=&memorialid=&mcid=&datefilter=&orderby=r
On St. Claire Pollock, whose body is buried in Riverside Park in Manhattan, New York, see there and here:
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/riverside-park/monuments/1206
And I thought, they just made it up because it seemed like a good idea? I had been expecting something more substantial and authoritative.
Once again we see the randomness of peevery. Or, for those who peeve about “random,” the haphazardness of peevery.
Yes; despite a pretty traditionalist UK school education, I’d never even heard of this pseudorule prior to seeing it discussed on Language Log. I was astonished that anyone could take it seriously.
I’d never heard of the Strunk and White book, either, though that is perhaps even less surprising.
Brits seem to go for a rather different kind of grammar nonsense than Americans. More Latin and more punctuation; less stylistic fetishes masquerading as grammar.
Maybe it’s because of somewhat different sources of linguistic insecurity. Or maybe it’s just chance. It’s not as if such works succeed on their intrinsic merits, after all. (Fowler is only an apparent exception: certainly his work has owed a lot of its success to several genuine intrinsic merits, but the percentage of nonsense it contains is too low to qualify under the rule.)
On the more than 9600 males named Petrus, see here
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=Petrus&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=&locationId=&bio=&linkedToName=&plot=&memorialid=&mcid=&datefilter=&orderby=r&page=1#sr-117029387
Wikipedia suggests that “Petrus” has been more popular among Dutch-speakers than High-German-speakers and indeed the only Petrus I can recall offhand in my own family tree (18th century, Hudson Valley) was certainly descended from Dutch-speakers and may well have spoken De Taal at least a little himself.
The 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses record fewer than 25 first-name “St John” (no middle names recorded) of whom nearly half are Catholic; a lower fraction than the 75% overall, but higher than I expected. Surprisingly few are listed in both censuses. The best names are St John St Leger (Irish Church Protestant) and St John McOstrich (Presbyterian).
There used to be someone on the radio here in Baltimore called St George Crosse. Born in Grenada. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2019/08/18/rev-st-george-ib-crosse-religious-and-civil-rights-leader-dies/
David Eddyshaw: “Brits seem to go for a rather different kind of grammar nonsense than Americans. More Latin and more punctuation; less stylistic fetishes masquerading as grammar.”
Did you mean to say “less punctuation”? Or “more nonsense about punctuation”? My impression is that BrE uses generally less punctuation than AmE, mostly by not putting periods after abbreviations like Mr or after people’s initials (at least, in British newspaper style). I’ve also seen claims that British writing is less likely to use optional commas — see e.g. this post, where Language Hat endorses Geoff Pullum’s complaint that the Economist created a garden path by leaving out the comma after “failed” here:
But I haven’t seen a good source for that, and Zwicky, for one, seems to doubt it.
More nonsense about punctuation. (I had Lynn Truss in mind.)
My vague impression of a transatlantic qualitative variation in grammar-gullibity may well not survive rigorous scrutiny. I do have the feeling that different kinds of linguistic performance anxiety/hypochondria are involved, though.
The gurus seem to be more Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells in the UK and more Microsoft Word Grammar Check in the US. The first group lament the decline of the Good Old Ways while the second believe that One* Weird Trick can make you good and grammatical. Omit Needless Words!
I’d have to concede that there’s a lot of overlap, though.
* OK, perhaps six weird tricks.
There is a tradition among some subset of Dutch people (the Catholic ones?) to give saints’ names in full Latin form – Petrus, Jacobus, Hubertus, Marinus…
Or, in Classical Chinese: Omit Needless!
I may already have shared my hunch that, whereas punctuation may indicate a sentence’s prosody or its logical structure, BrE punctuation tends slightly more towards prosody and AmE toward logic.
Actually, a better theory (and more pro-American) might be that the Brit pseudogrammar stuff, despite its ostensible self-help packaging, is really aimed at people who believe they’re superior already, and want to sneer at the (supposedly) ignorant, whereas the American ones are genuinely aspirational (and the work of people who really do believe that they are uplifting the grammatically downtrodden.)
Again, some overlap …
Excellent piece, but I have a few notes:
The purported that/which rule did not originate with Fowler. The earliest statement I am aware of is from Goold Brown’s Grammar of English Grammars, a highly eccentric brick of a book published in 1851. The idea was floating beneath the surface for the half century before it bubbled up with the Fowlers.
This raises my second point. The piece treats the Fowler guides as if they were a novelty. This is fair enough in that Yagoda was writing about Fowler and had a word count limit, but we should keep in mind that the works lay solidly within a tradition of usage manuals published on both sides of the Atlantic. Why it so dominates our attention a century later as to make us forget what came before is an interesting question. But if we want to understand his place in usage discussions, we cannot ignore the earlier tradition.
As a final note, I observed long ago that self-appointed sticklers treat Fowler like fundamentalist Christians treat the Bible: Fundamentalists make great claims about reading the Bible literally, when what they actually do is home in on a few carefully selected passages to read literally, read other passages with a strained interpretation that they declare to be literal, and carefully ignore the vast swaths of scripture that contradict their favored reading. Sticklers do the same thing, which is how they can invoke Fowler in support of fetishes he explicitly denied. Both then take a victory lap, celebrating their fidelity to Revealed Truth.
Re the verb in “shouldn’t high hat it,” in the sentence hat praised. That was not something in my own lexicon although I could sort of guess at it. But https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/high-hat has a good example sentence (from 1934 and Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe book) illustrating the “interwar” verbal sense, beginning “I don’t high-hat technical words, because I know there [are] a lot of things that can’t be said any other way, but …”
I’d never heard of “high-hat” as a verb either, and guessed it had something to do with hitting with a drumstick — wrong! It works great in its context, but if you and I don’t know it, are we just ignorant or should the dictionaries start marking it “dated” or “historical”? Do other people here know it?
Green has lots of citations, the earliest from Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925). These are the last five; note the useful abbreviation “con.”, meaning context:
Actually, all five of these should have “con.” notes. In the book about advertising, that section is about the 1920s-30s, and “high-hatted” is in quotation marks because it’s quoted from a trade journal of that period (a few lines later there’s a footnote citing sources). From the Hidewood is a memoir about growing up in the 1930s-40s. And Songquest is the journal of a folklorist who collected songs from sailors on the Great Lakes in the 1930s.
Lighter’s RHHDAS also covers the verb, with first citations from Edmund Wilson in 1922 and 1923. There are two citations after the 1960s: Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, about Project Mercury in 1960, and a family-saga romance published 1985, in a scene taking place in 1950.
The OED (revised 2014) has a citation for the verb from 2010 — but this, too, turns out to be a detective story set in the 1930s.
(ETA: probably “high hat” can still be considered current as a noun, meaning a snob or a snobbish attitude, and an adjective.)
I think it plausible to say that both ktschwarz and myself have a sufficiently expansive-to-obscure lexicon that if we both don’t know a purported English lexeme, it is not because we are lamentably ignorant but because the lexeme is dated or inconveniently regional or otherwise Extremely Obscure. As the style of hat referenced by “high hat” itself becomes ever more dated or historical or obscure, the still-current drum-kit-/percussion sense of “high hat” inexorably becomes less marginal and more central, and thus the various extended senses derived metaphorically from the literal hat-style (which don’t flow so well from the percussive sense, itself a now obscure metaphor from the literal hat) become less intuitive and more opaque.
On a 2018 episode of A Way With Words, the radio show by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, a listener called in to talk about a use of “high hat” as a verb in her mother’s diary from 1936 — the listener didn’t know it and had to look it up in a dictionary, and Grant commented that “it kind of fades after World War II”, but “it still shows up in historical fiction in places where people try to resurrect old language.”
(I’m impressed with all the work they’ve done on these audio episodes to make them searchable.)
Jon Polito’s character in Miller’s Crossing (set in the 1920s or 1930s) says things like, “I’m sick a gettin’ the high hat,” a lot. Using it as a noun, the meaning is fairly clear, although I would have expected using it as a verb to have been more common in actual period speech.
Fascinating piece — I’ve always admired how language evolves through precision and purpose, just as sacred texts balance meaning and rhythm. Reading about Fowler’s dedication to clarity reminded me of the literary and spiritual beauty found in classical Arabic texts like Surah Yasin, often called the “heart of the Qur’an.” Both show how carefully chosen words can shape thought, emotion, and timeless influence.
I’m an American (at least originally) and I also was surprised when I learned rather late in life about the purported that/which rule. And that I shouldn’t write “towards” with an s.
Was Fowler the original Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells?
Re was Fowler the original DiTW, see Richard Hershberger’s comment about how he was working in an established tradition.
Good point, but did those who established the tradition grow up in Royal Tunbridge Wells?
As opposed to Ancient Tunbridge Wells.
(The two were merged in 1997 as the consolidated municipality of Royal & Ancient Tunbridge Wells.)
“You’re putting me on.”
Tee-hee.
I’m a bit late to the party, but my impression is that many of the people who “quote” Fowler’s view of anything without having actually read what he wrote regard him as being more prescriptive than he was in reality; I see him more as a believer in clarity and common sense than in immutable laws. Reading his text on which/that (p. 712 in the 1926 edition) I understand him to be saying that the important distinction was that a non-defining clause needs to be preceded with a comma, whereas a defining clause should not be; that the choice of which or that for introducing a defining clause is less important.
Fowler lived in Tonbridge: Disgusted lives in Tunbridge Wells. These are two different places (albeit fairly close to one another).
Before that he lived in Guernsey, where my parents were married (in 1935, well after Fowler had left). Further before that he taught at Sedbergh, a school that I narrowly escaped being sent to, and which I would have hated, but fortunately my mother took a strong dislike to the headmaster when she met him.
If being late to the party is wrong, I don’t want to be right!
Yagoda says about the that/which rule: “Ross and his colleagues later elevated the proposal into policy, and, in part through The New Yorker’s influence, it came to be viewed by most authorities in the United States as a rule.”
Of course, the New Yorker is not notably successful at obeying this rule: you’re likely to find an occasional defining “which” in many longer articles (well, not Yagoda’s, he would’ve been self-conscious about it). For example, in the piece about R.F. Kuang linked by Language Hat several weeks ago:
Or in the recent piece about fact checking, Language Hat quoted this:
I suppose they could wriggle out of that one by claiming it wasn’t for publication, but at any rate, it shows that the “rule” wasn’t deeply ingrained in the editors’ minds. I bet that was as true in Ross’s day as it is now: the big boss gets a notion and pats himself on the back for it, while the regular staff mostly just go about their business.
Are Ton- and Tun- pronounced the same? (Yearly reminder to myself that ton is pronounced tun. I keep forgetting.)
First rule with Brit place-names: how it’s spelled is not how it’s said. Happisburgh!