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H. W. Fowler Quotes
1858–1933 England
Henry Watson Fowler (10 March 1858 – 26 December 1933) was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English language. He often collaborated with his brother Francis George Fowler (1871–1918).
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12 quotes
Every one knows an Americanism, at present, when he sees it; how long that will be true is a more anxious question.
The King's English (1906)
Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated.
The King's English (1906)
Is the function of newspapers to force upon us against our will the buying of French dictionaries?
The King's English (1906)
The term, then, is obviously a relative one: my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education and someone else’s ignorance.
French Words - Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth - greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.
The difficulty is that some French, Latin, and other words are now also English, though the fiction that they are not is still kept up by italics and (with French words) conscientious efforts at pronunciation.
The King's English (1906)
Terribly - It is strange that a people with such a fondness for understatement as the British should have felt the need to keep changing the adverbs by which they hope to convince listeners of the intensity of their feelings.
Inversion - Writers who observe the poignency sometimes given by inversion, but fail to observe that 'sometimes' means 'when exclamation is appropriate', adopt inversion as a infallible enlivener; they aim at freshness and attain frigidity.
Split Infinitive - The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitve is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.
What a writer effects by using these ornaments is to make us imagine him telling us he is a wise fellow and one that hath everything handsome about him, including a gentlemanly acquaintance with the French language.
The King's English (1906)
Kipling...and his school are americanizing us. His style exhibits a sort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets and other words that suggests the application of coloured photography to description; the camera is superseding the human hand.
The King's English (1906)
I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truth multiplied. He had a nimbler wit, a better sense of proportion, and a more open mind, than his twelve-year-older partner. [speaking of his deceased brother]