OK, with that out of the way. let’s talk about Harold Ross and H.K. Fowler. Harold Ross, as the select few still reading this bit well know, founded the New Yorker back in 1925, and a year later Fowler published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, in which Ross’s compulsive grammatical fussiness met its match, and Fowler’s Dictionary became Ross’s bible. Or so we have been told.
I have been conducting my own compulsively fussy review of the writings of James Thurber, a review that has itself grown increasingly compulsive and fussy. I noted in an earlier post, “Words, Words, Words,” that in some early “Talk of the Town” pieces that Thurber wrote in the late twenties and early thirties, and reprinted in his collection The Beast in Me, the scarcely American word “chivvy” was spelt in two different ways—as both “chivvy” and “chevy”—in two pieces published two years apart. Now that I have a copy of Fowler (the 1926 edition, to be sure), I’m a bit amazed to find that Fowler spelt the word “chivy”! WTF, n’est-ce pas?
Furthermore, in another collection of Thurber’s pieces, The Owl in the Attic, I find a stunning atrocity, “centre-fielder,” which surely cannot be blamed on Fowler. In an early “Talk” piece we find “cheque,”* which is bad enough, but “centre-fielder” is a mid-Atlantic collision of affectation and idiocy that ought to be allowed simply to sink of its own weight.
The Owl in the Attic also contains “rôle,” which, Fowler insists, needlessly maintains the circumflex, and the “sanctity,” of the French form, which, you can guess, he is against.† The word “role”, he maintains, and I with him, has been thoroughly Anglicized. Everyone knows what it means, and there is no reason to get all Gallic on our asses, so stop already.
Afterwords
Though Fowler is generally typed as the prissiest of Priscians, “willfully idiosyncratic” is perhaps a better term. He freely admits that usage, or, as he prefers, “Fashion,” determines both meaning and pronunciation, but he has many hobby horses of his own design, which he rides furiously. He is amusingly contemptuous of etymology—the notion that a word’s “true meaning” can only be found in its history he regards, correctly, as mere nonsense. Yet while acknowledging the inevitability of change in the abstract, he often resists it in the concrete.
He takes pronunciation very seriously, and hopes that, although everyone pronounces “pneumatic” and “pneumonia” without the “p”, perhaps in the future people will come to pronounce such less common forms as “pneumatology” and “pneumonometer” “correctly,” though it’s hard to see how, even assuming—which is grotesque—that any normal person would have any occasion to pronounce either, since “pnu” is not an English sound, and only a Greek scholar—and only a pretentious one at that—would pretend to know how to produce it.
He agrees with the purists at the OED that “flute” and “lute” ought to be pronounced with a “y” sound, that is, “flyoote” and “lyoote,” rather than “floote” and “loote,” but he admits that the battle has already been lost, since if we insist on “flyoote” and “lyoote,” then we must also demand “glyoo” and “blyoo,” which clearly we can’t. Do you follow?
Fowler also finds himself hoist on his own petard when arguing for absolute distinctions in the usage (and meaning) of “shall” versus “will” and “should” versus “would,” punching aggressively through the plain future and conditional, the “I would like” bog, the indefinite future and relative, and “elegant variations” (a continuing bugbear), before stumbling over the dreaded “that clauses,” where “the drawing of the line is not easy” (i.e., impossible), and then concluding strangely with the clearly dubious yet somehow permissible “decorative and oracular shall” usages (the latter, of course, being at once “far less conscious & artificial” than the former, but also somehow “better avoided”—the decorative, one guesses, being inherently less dangerous than the oracular).
*The New Shorter Oxford defines “cheque” elegantly as “the counterfoil of a bank bill, draft, etc.”
†Yet Wikipedia, in its very definition of “circumflex,” employs “rôle” as an example of its use in English. And so the battle never ends.
