At times of upward social mobility, the etiquette books appear, to teach the rising groups how to behave almost indistinguishably from the groups they join or supplant. In the modern world such books have appeared in spurts from Castiglione’s Courtier in the Renaissance to Emily Post, and I suspect that when the Babylonians replaced the Sumerians they promptly produced cuneiform tablets teaching table manners. Language habits are particularly sensitive indicators of class and education, as we saw in the recent British controversy over “U” and “Non-U” speech (the “U” standing for “University,” and thus by extension “Upper Class”). The relationship of language to status is less absolute in this country, but as the advertisements offering to increase your earning power by increasing your vocabulary make clear, there it is. A generation or two ago it was the problem of Jiggs’s Maggie, who needed simple correct grammar to go with her new wealth, or greenhorn cousin Shmelka, who needed English idioms and more certainty about v’s and w’s when he talked to customers in the store. Now the problem is more complicated. Maggie’s daughter Marlene lives in Larchmont and addresses the PTA, and Shmelka’s grandson Stuart works in advertising and is a Young Republican. What they need is some handy guide to the difference between factious and factitious, fictious and fictitious, or reliable information on the nuances of meaning between harangue and tirade. Dictionaries are of no use because they note alternatives in most cases without recommendation, they are not concerned with transitory subtleties of fashion, and they are a nuisance because each word must be looked up separately. To fill the special needs of Marlene and Stuart, handbooks of usage come into being.

A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage,¹ by Bergen and Cornelia Evans, does not attempt to evade these delicate matters of status. “Respectable English,” the preface says, “means the kind of English that is used by the most respected people, the sort of English that will make readers or listeners regard you as an educated person.” Certain “perfectly intelligible” usages “are not used by educated people and hence are regarded as ‘incorrect’ and serve as the mark of a class.” The Evans book is offered as a guide to “what is currently accepted as good English” in the United States; “It is designed for people who speak standard English but are uncertain about some details.” Thus an entry will conclude characteristically, “This construction is condemned by some grammarians, but in the United States it is accepted and used by well-educated people”; or, of something disapproved, “Speech of this kind shows that one’s friends aren’t bookish people.”

For Marlene and Stuart, many of the book’s distinctions are useful and informative. Loving is chaste as an adjective (a true and loving wife), concupiscent as a noun (I need loving). Costive does not mean costly but constipated, noisome does not mean noisy but obnoxious. Recrudescence is the breaking-out-again only of something thoroughly unpleasant in England, of anything at all here. It may even be helpful to know that “The plural of the tailor’s goose and of the improper gesture is gooses.” Some of the examples look as though they were aimed at making the diner-out civil, if not necessarily a wit, so that remarks on the plural of asparagus conclude “The food is always treated as a singular, as in this asparagus is good and how long did you cook it?” The most useful thing the Evanses (the Evans? their book gives no clue) do is hammer away insistently at clichés: bowels of the earth “has been in constant service since 1593 and should be retired”; brown as a berry “has been repeated ceaselessly for more than five hundred years and is entitled to at least that long a rest”; brown study “should be avoided”; and so on endlessly. Phrases like it stands to reason that are dismissed as “no more than a clearing of the throat.” Sometimes the authors offer constructive alternatives to clichés in the form of less bedraggled clichés. They remark of as thick as thieves:

For those who want to avoid it but still feel the need for some such comparison, there are many established alternatives waiting: as thick as hail, as thick as hops, as thick as huckleberries, for those who wish to emphasize profusion; as thick as porridge, for those who have specific density in mind; and for chumminess, a fine old Scotch simile, as thick as three in a bed.

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The decision sooner or later forced on all such books is when you ride the hobbyhorse of common usage and when you dismount. The authors will accept like for as in Winston tastes good like a cigarette should (as Mr. Evans suggested in his television program), but their appeal is not to its victory in oral currency, but to examples in Shakespeare, More, Sidney, Dryden, Smollett, Burns, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Darwin, Newman, Brontë, Thackeray, Morris, Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Masefield, Maugham, and the eleventh Britannica. The authors tend to follow usage in most cases, but periodically they take a stand against it. They disapprove of the debasement of a word like agony in I was in agony in those new shoes, proposing instead My feet hurt; but they record the similar debasement of the word passion, from the Passion of Christ on the Cross to She had a passion for fresh strawberries, without comment. They regularly protest such meaningless business jargon as enclosed please find, under separate cover, and enclosed herewith, although usage is overwhelming. They have odd nostalgias for old forms, even remarking of the obsolete spellings hickop and hicket for hiccup, “It’s a pity they’ve been lost.”

On the short sharp words of prejudice, the Evanses make no pretense of following common usage, but deliberately set out to reform it. Of Jew they remark characteristically: “It is a word of incomparable dignity and immeasurable scorn and everything in between. It used to be a word of great comic range but that, at least, is fading. Its colloquial uses as an adjective or a verb are all offensive. The guidance to the ‘correct’ use of the noun does not lie in any dictionary but in the heart and mind of the user.” There are no entries for words like kike and sheeny. Under mulatto the authors state their general principle: “All racial designations illustrate the difficulty underlying euphemism: contempt or disdain or dislike cannot be made acceptable to its victims by a mere change of words”; but under Negro; nigger; nigra; darky they insist “Negro is the proper and, in formal writing, now the only permissible name.” The entry on African suggests special pleading, concluding: “In English as used in South Africa no white man is a native (even though native) and no black man is a South African (even though he and his ancestors have lived in South Africa for many generations).”

Some of the information in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage would seem relatively useless, in terms of the book’s stated intentions or by any criteria. KLM, it turns out, stands for the Dutch airline Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maat-schaapij voor Nederland en Kolonien N. V. The plural of caryopsis is caryopsises or caryopsides, not caryopses; the plural of coccyx is coccyxes or coccyges, not coccyces; the plural of dialysis is dialyses. The correct Arabic singular is jinni and the plural jinn. Other information is certainly misinformation. The authors confuse the aegis of Zeus, forged by Hephaestus, with that of his daughter Athena, with the Gorgon’s head in its center, and they pontificate “There is only one aegis and in its classical sense the word does not have a plural.” They understand feral, in use at least since 1659 to mean a domesticated plant or animal that has run wild, as meaning simply wild or animal (although they quote Darwin’s “The dovecote pigeon . . . has become feral in several places” as their example). Consequently they identify it as “solely a literary word” (although it is an accepted technical term, and in fact the only term, in several sciences), connect it only with one of Mr. Evans’s pet peeves, the legends of children reared by animals, and laugh it away. The authors think skittles and ninepins “are two names for the same game,” although skittles is an entirely different game played with a spinning disk or top. They claim that the ending of Spaniard is “the derogatory formation seen in coward, sluggard, drunkard, and so on,” but make no attempt to explain wizard, poniard, galliard, and the rest.

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The comparison that A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage provokes on every page is with Henry Watson Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1926 and the standard reference work since. The Evans book may be read as a running argument with Fowler and his rigors, and at times they resemble nothing so much as modern, permissive parents battling the authoritarian, curmudgeonly old grandfather. On asset: “Fowler regards it with stern disapproval and adjures his readers to shun it. Yet it is a common word in our language now and a useful one. It is an asset to the language. That it is a false singular is of no importance.” Fowler lists donate among back-formations too irregular to be used, but it is “now a fully accepted word.” The Americanism caption, for a legend under a picture, “has given some purists a conniption. . . . ‘Rare in British use,’ grumps Fowler, ‘& might well be rarer’ “; but the Evanses embrace it, “now standard usage.” They write: “Fowler inveighs against the use of conservative as an adjective to mean moderate when qualifying a noun such as figure or estimate as ‘perhaps the most ridiculous of slipshod extensions.’ But the processes of language are indifferent to ridicule,” and, in short, “Certainly in American usage conservative is now standard in the meaning of moderate.”

On fiddle: “Fowler incites us to rebel in the old word’s defense. . . . But it is a lost cause.” Of Frankenstein for the name of the monster: “None the less the term is now established (‘almost, but surely not quite, sanctioned by custom,’ cries Fowler in a plea which he must have felt to be futile).” Regarding frock: “Fowler called it ‘a nurseryism of the same kind as nighty & shimmy’ but it did no good.” Of phenomenal: “Fowler foresaw this loose extension of the word’s meaning and sternly condemned it as ‘a sin against the English language.’ But his condemnation, though reiterated by a host of lesser authorities, could not stay the word’s efflorescence or degradation. Its primary meaning now is certainly ‘extraordinary’ or ‘prodigious.’ “The entry on elevator must be quoted entire:

Fowler’s classification of elevator as a ‘superfluous word,’ his designation of it as ‘a cumbrous and needless Americanism,’ and his stern suggestion that it be at least restricted to ‘its hardly-avoidable commercial sense of grainhoist,’ fall on modern ears with all the tinkling quaintness of a harpsichord. It is now standard in American usage, established beyond challenge, too common to be cumbrous. Lift, which Fowler would have used in its stead, is, of course, so used in England, but even to traveled Americans it seems comic and to most Americans it would simply be incomprehensible.

Beneath these disagreements, as the tone suggests, admiration and even envy bubble. On electrocute they note “Fowler’s assurance that this ‘barbarism’ jars the nerves of Latinists ‘much more cruelly than the operation denoted jars those of its victim’ must be accepted as a linguist’s grim humor.” They quote admiringly his rhetorical question on meticulous, “What strange charm makes this wicked word irresistible?” Sometimes they join him in his hopeless causes: fighting for belly as “a good, sensible, established, time-honored word” against the imprecise nice nellies who say stomach or even (horrors!) tummy; complaining that banal was borrowed from France when the English “had a dozen good words at home to choose from”; protesting that people debase the language by using literally to mean figuratively as in I’m literally melting; or announcing that onomatopeic is the preferred form of the adjective, with no reason given.

Sometimes the Evanses take a strong Fowlerian tone: “How our hearts sink at a prefatory frankly, for we know some brutality is to follow, and a craven brutality, too.” At other times they are weakly Fowlerian, identifying a phrase that “has now become a pompous cliché if used seriously and a feeble jest if used facetiously.” Sometimes it is his sort of indignant metaphor:

Prudery moves on prurience as a snail in its own slime and leaves the trail of this slime over all that it touches. The gallant cock and the patient ass are forever banished from our speech and we have only the nursery equivalents of rooster and donkey.

The Evanses are most Fowlerian, perhaps, in their divagations. The entry on hemlock explains that the American hemlock is not Socrates’ poisonous variety with some of the bold digressiveness of Fowler’s entry on fir, pine, beginning “Most of us have wished vaguely & vainly at times that they knew a fir from a pine.” Under dog’s life, lead a we get a wild surrealist essay on the conditions of canine existence, culminating in:

Certainly today, with the veterinarian’s bill often exceeding the pediatrician’s, with canine psychiatrists, with dog sitters, with vitamin-enriched canned dog food, with quilted coats and fur-lined booties, with rubberfoam mattresses, boarding houses, schools of etiquette and even orphanages, a dog’s life can no longer serve as the trope of wretchedness and all phrases that so imply must be discarded as clichés.

The entry on fit for a king concludes:

But the glory of kings has departed. Except for three or four housebroken survivors, a monarch’s life today is not a happy one. What is now fit for a king? Shabby rooms in a hotel on the Riviera, overdue bills, the hissing conspirator, the yawning waiter, the sneering reporter, the gossip columnist, and in the shadow the assassin. Fit for a king is now a ghoul’s cliché. Let it be mercifully abandoned.

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Apparently language usage books are now in the pioneering stage dictionaries were in, in Samuel Johnson’s day, vehicles for the cranky and opinionated individual voice, which will eventually be supplanted by the more uniform, authoritative, and duller collaboration of anonymous scholars. We can get a vivid picture of the personality behind A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage. For convenience let us call it “Bergen Evans,” a figure we already know to some extent from his books and television programs. (This is unfair to sister Cornelia, an author and public figure in her own right, but it is probably inevitable in any collaboration with a television personality, and we can enter the reservation that any given feature of “Bergen Evans” may be hers.) The jacket says that Evans grew up in Ohio and England, studied at Miami and Harvard and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, is now an English professor at Northwestern, has written two books debunking popular fallacies, and is “the informative and witty moderator” of television programs. We could have guessed Harvard from the book’s mockery of the Boston accent in a long entry, ending with the suggestion that if God no longer speaks in Hebrew, “He at least has a Boston accent”; combined with its indignant denial of the existence of anything that might be called a “Harvard” accent, the entry under that heading beginning “Harvard accent is a cliché of resentment that mingles malice and ignorance in about equal proportions.” We can see traces of the debunking books in the confusion about feral mentioned earlier, and an entry on lone wolf repeats Evans’s obsessive concern that no one continue to think wolves hunt in packs. The pattern is superficially Johnsonian, in its odd combination of provincial and metropolitan culture, and Johnson too had a doctorate. Evans clearly has the great lexicographer in mind, Johnson anecdotes and quotations run through his book, and in at least one place, echoing some strictures of Fowler’s against psychological moment, he goes far beyond Fowler’s tone to the authentic rhythms of the Grand Cham himself: “The phrase was woolly in its inception, confused in its translation, affected in its adoption, and misunderstood in its application.”

Evans’s true prototype, however, is neither of these British gentlemen, but America’s own Henry L. Mencken, and there is some evidence that it is Mencken’s whopping jackboots Evans is attempting to fill. There are considerable differences (it is hard to picture Mencken as a Rhodes scholar or a Harvard Ph.D., or as fiercely democratic in Evans’s fashion) but there are even more considerable resemblances, and the special field Evans has staked out for himself, combining negative debunking of nonsense with positive labors on behalf of the American language, is Mencken’s own. Evans has many of Mencken’s irritating provincialities: he mocks the jargon of heraldry in bar sinister (“It’s much simpler to say ‘He was a bastard’ “); he scorns the use of Latin quotations (“It serves only to mark one as either a hopeless pedant or an affected ass”); and he snipes at modern literature (“Spenser, in the manner later employed by T. S. Eliot, went out of his way to be obscure”). Evans has all of Mencken’s ambivalent fascination with popular culture. He praises L’il Abner, Pogo, and Mad Comics; tells Goldwyn jokes; draws his examples from “The Stag at Eve” and Ogden Nash; goes out of his way to promote Come Back Little Sheba as “a moving treatment of a slattern”; and has a long, fascinated entry on Stephen Potter’s gamesmanship, which he traces back to Chaucer. Unfortunately, Evans is just as apt to be wrong as right in these references: in a long article on nicknames he refers learnedly to “Hot Lips Paige,” although the name is Page, and his friends called him “Lips”; “In the cynical terminology of bebop” Evans defines “A square, to the zoot-suit cognoscenti, is one who is not hep,” although zoot-suit is a stage earlier than bop, and of course the word is hip.

Evans has much of Mencken’s smartaleck quality, although, since he makes the astonishing claim that smart aleck has amatory connotations, and has been “replaced by the humorous, less disparaging, slang term smarty pants,” perhaps we should say, much of Mencken’s smarty-pants quality. He remarks of bright and early, “The airlines report more delays because of fog in their early morning flights than at any other time of the day.” Of crossword puzzles, “the malady lingers on.” Of stag:

In colloquial American usage it designates a man unaccompanied by a woman at a social gathering or a special party for men unaccompanied by their wives. It also means a swine which has been castrated after the maturation of the sex organs. There is no known etymological connection between these last meanings.

Some of Evans’s entries are terribly cute, running to vulgar suggestions about saltpeter, comic differentiations (“Many trusties have been recruited from the second sort of trustee”), and such examples as, for science, “Boy, he’s got that down to a science!”

Evans tries to dismiss each cliché with its own little joke: “a feather in one’s cap is now bedraggled and droopy and no feather in anyone’s stylistic cap”; as an image, the apple of one’s eye “seems repulsively bloodshot and grotesque”; “fresh as a daisy is a wilted metaphor”; on grin and bear it, “one must bear it, but the grin has long since faded”; “to feather one’s nest is strictly for the birds”; and so on. He advises his readers to reply to “Alas, poor Yorick” with “What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?” and other funny quotations from Hamlet. The best example of Evans’s odd ambivalence toward mass culture is his attitude toward Time. He finds it “deft with this ploy” of gamesmanship, and mocks its pretense of omniscience, but is awed by the “brilliant creations” of its portmanteau words, adducing cinemactress in evidence. Even Mencken, who praises the “terse and dramatic words” of comic strips in one of the American Language books, would not have prostrated himself before the brilliance of cinemactress.

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The portrait of H. W. Fowler that emerges from A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is very different. We could have guessed that he was a schoolmaster and classical scholar, Tory, High Church Anglican (from the entry under Catholic that will not allow the term to be monopolized by Roman Catholics), Blimpish (recommending doctress, “Everyone knows the inconvenience of being uncertain whether a doctor is a man or a woman”), snobbish, and prejudiced. He is the oracle of the club, and he has the authentic voice:

No; a barbarism is like a lie; it has got the start of us before we have found it out, & we cannot catch it; it is in possession, & our offers of other versions come too late.

Poor old foreword! your vogue is past, your freshness faded; you are antiquated, vieux jeu, passé, démodé; your nose is out of joint.

Fie! fie! a Greek tragedy and protagonists?

Can any man say that sort of thing & retain a shred of self-respect?

Sensitize is a word made for the needs of photography, & made badly.

Fowler is learned and literate but insistently not literary; “literary critics’ word” is almost his strongest abuse: “Distinction, as a literary critics’ word, is, like charm, one of those on which they fall back when they wish to convey that a style is meritorious, but have not time to make up their minds upon the precise nature of its merit.” Fowler must have kept the members laughing their heads off, if we can judge by the entry under pun: the automatic discrediting of puns being “a sign at once of sheepish docility & desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, & indifferent, & only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact.”

Fowler’s characteristic posture is that of King Canute commanding the waves to cease (“So strong is the false belief that every bully must be a coward that acts requiring great courage are constantly described as cowardly if they are so carried out as not to give the victim a sporting chance”). He himself never fights unless he is hopelessly outnumbered, and it is never in the hope of victory, only to keep defeat from being total: “Is it too late to suggest that ‘my betrothed’ . . . should be given another chance?”; anyone who uses nice “in its more proper senses . . . does a real if small service to the language”; of obnoxious in the old sense of open to attack, “we may hope that scholarly writers will keep it alive.” When Fowler surrenders, it is only after the last cat and rat have been eaten, and no one is left to man the ramparts: “Though pandar is the older & better form, it is useless to try to restore it”; “any attempt to keep tetchy alive seems due to a liking for curiosities.” When Fowler accepted “sixteenmo” as proper for “sextodecimo,” something died in Jacobite hearts all over the world.

Yet there is a stubborn practicality in him that tempers the purism, a Sancho Panza coexisting with Don Quixote: “We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial”; even “Seriously, our learned persons & possessors of special information should not, when they are writing for the general public, presume to improve the accepted vocabulary.” Fowler’s real heresy is what might be called Adamist, the idea that everything has its true name, the name God gave it, or as Modern English Usage phrases it, “among these names there is usually one that may be regarded as the thing’s proper name, its kurion onoma or dominant name as the Greeks called it.” He was, altogether, an original and a redoubtable figure, and it may be just as well that we shall not soon see his like again.

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At which, inevitably, appears A Dictionary of American-English Usage: Based on Fowler’s Modern English Usage,² Fowler rewritten for Marlene and Stuart by Margaret Nicholson, head of the Contract and Copyright department of the Macmillan Company. Her preface admits “To tamper with Fowler has taken both humility and courage—or perhaps foolhardiness,” and states the conditions of her venture fully:

New words and idioms have come into the language since the publication of Modern English Usage; there are peculiarities of American speech and writing not recorded by Fowler; and many of us today, English and American, have neither the time nor the scholarship to follow through the fascinating but sometimes exasperating labyrinth of Greek and Latin parallels and Fowler’s Socratic method of teaching by wrong examples. American-English Usage is an adaptation of MEU, not a replacement. AEU is a simplified MEU, with American variations, retaining as much of the original as space allowed. Many of the longer articles had to be shortened, many of the more academic ones and those less pertinent to usage today were omitted, to make room for new entries and illustrations. Fowler’s own mannerisms and pedantries—and I am sure he would have been the last to deny them—have been left untouched. There was a temptation sometimes to soften the sting of “illiterate,” “journalese,” “lady novelists,” “uneducated writers”; perhaps Fowler himself would have tempered some of them had he revised his book, but only Fowler could decide that. They have been left as he wrote them.

Miss Nicholson has perhaps not tampered with Fowler quite enough. She leaves many of his pronunciations untouched, even where, as in parliament (“Pron. par’lament”), I think many Americans join me in saying “par’lyament.” To his strictures against pronouncing the t in often, which he says is “practiced by two oddly consorted classes—the academic speakers who affect a more precise enunciation than their neighbors’” and “the uneasy half-literates who like to prove that they can spell,” she adds a parenthesis noting that the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster “more charitably” allow the pronunciation as an accepted regional variation. (It should be recorded that the Evans book offers no guidance to pronunciation, for no stated reason).

Miss Nicholson has cut Fowler’s explanaion of genteelisms and his long list of examples, but has neglected to add any mention of the English U and Non-U controversy, which was precisely over the class associations of these paired words: lowerclass people using the genteel serviette where their blunter betters say napkin. She has left in and even amplified Fowler’s instructions (for Ernest Bevin’s generation, perhaps) on how to address a lord, although it would be more useful for Marlene and Stuart to know how to address a Congressman, and she has retained his complaint that the Japanese example has ruined the fine old simplicity of British titles. She has preserved the little gem of an essay on how to tell firs from pines, although she has changed Fowler’s “most of us have wished . . . they knew” to the more colloquial “most of us have wished . . . we knew.” Miss Nicholson has omitted Fowler’s indignant entry on frock, but has not replaced it with some explanation for the confusing negligee; she has added a brief entry on O. K., which Fowler scorned to notice (she removed his okapi to do it), but nothing on Hi; she has added ingenuous but not disingenuous; she omits many words that since Fowler’s time have come into general use, such as denture, or general misuse, such as fulsome.

Miss Nicholson adds an entry on pinch hitter, and takes a properly Fowerlian line to it, that it is often misused to mean an inferior rather than, as it does in baseball, a superior substitute. She keeps Fowler’s two explanations of burlesque as a form of caricature, without taking any notice of the fact that, in the words of the Evanses, “In America burlesque has a special meaning, one probably much better known to the masses than its older meaning: a theatrical entertainment featuring coarse comedy and dancing.” She preserves Fowler’s assurance that those who wish to mark their adherence to the technical sense of the word myth, rather than the popular sense, do so by pronouncing it with the long i—but if there ever were any such people they have long since gone. Miss Nicholson retains Fowler’s entry on phallus, which consists in its entirety of the statement that the plural is phalli (the word ought to be phallos and phalloi, there being no reason to take a Greek word in the Latin form), and she makes no mention of penis, which has become the general respectable word in America, popularized I suspect by nursery school teachers and people Fowler would call doctresses.

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Miss Nicholson’s principal alteration has been to give up on Fowler’s lost causes, surrendering in each case to the waves of popular usage. Where he says that the singular aborigine “is felt to be anomalous & avoided or disliked,” she says “though gaining in popularity, even among scholars, is still avoided or disliked by many.” With the Evanses, she repudiates Fowler and accepts asset (“through usage has been accepted in both US and Brit.”), caption (“firmly established in US”), donate (“chiefly US”), electrocute (no mention), elevator (“standard US, lift Brit.”), Frankenstein (“Most US dictionaries now give as a second meaning of Frankenstein the monster so created”), and many others. Where Fowler took no stand, she can give in even more readily, with the typical comment “The misuse is so frequent as to be almost established,” or “undoubtedly right, but the battle is in vain.” Thus Webster gives the pronunciation as Gr?n’wich Village, “but it is not commonly so called there.” Miss Nicholson quotes Sir Ernest Gowers accepting I will go for simple future tense with the slogan “If we go by practice rather than by precept,” and on that basis even accepts up as an intensive (eat up your food), at which we can imagine Fowler roaring like the Father Bear.

Despite her introductory statement, Miss Nicholson omits Fowler’s strictures against banal, banality (“These are LITERARY CRITICS’ WORDS, imported from France by a class of writers whose jaded taste relishes novel or imposing jargon”) and a number of other diatribes and harangues, as she omits his eight pages of French words with phonetic pronunciation, his examples of poetry, and much else that gives his book its color and variety. What she has added is mostly of a specifically American character: a protest against irregardless, which he had probably never heard; notes that words like exotic and facet have become American “VOGUE WORDS” (the second replacing Fowler’s entry on facetiae, apparently not an American vogue word); and so forth. On vase, Fowler says flatly “Pron. vahz (not vawz)”; Miss Nicholson says, in a burst of patriotism, “For most Americans the natural pronunciation is vas. This is not a ‘US illiteracy’; it was the earlier pronunciation in England.” Where Fowler says the plural of dwarf is dwarves, and the Evanses say “The plural is dwarfs, not dwarves,” Miss Nicholson offers a compromise, “Usually dwarfs, rarely dwarves.”

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Much of her effort, not surprisingly, has been with Fowler’s race prejudices. His remarkable entry on nigger, “Applied to others than full or partial negroes, is felt as an insult by the person described,” becomes in her hands “Sometimes used familiarly between two Negroes with affection. Used by a non-Negro it is offensive.” Where Fowler’s only entry on darky consists of instructions for forming the plural, she writes “Spell darky, if used; pl. darkies. (Colloq., often offensive.)” Fowler’s entry on Hebrew, Israelite, Jew, Semite contains the statement that the word Jew is sometimes avoided because it “has certain traditional implications (as usury, anti-Christianity) that are unsuited to the context”; her entry on Hebrew, Israelite, Israeli, Jew, Semite says nothing of the sort. Miss Nicholson oddly reprints without alteration Fowler’s statement that “the normal uses” are A Chinaman and Three Chinamen, as against the Evanses’ much more accurate “In the United States the preferred form is Chinese, as in one Chinese and two Chinese.”

Miss Nicholson is in personality and opinion apparently very unlike her predecessor. Where he saw the United States as a nation of semi-literate aboriginals, she is at least defensively American: “To reject these words simply because they are ‘chiefly US’ is evidence of a sorry lack of faith in our own culture.” Where he is backward-looking and austere, she is forward-looking and chatty. Fowler might have admired her distinction “Eatable implies a measure of palatability, whereas even tripe is edible,” but what would he have made of the world casually assumed by her entry on sloe-eyed, “The mystery and romance writers who describe their heroines thus seem to be thinking of the effects of sloe gin rather than the bluish-black plum”?

What one sees in the usage books, in short, are the crotchets of strongly marked personalities, but behind them and ultimately determining, the shifting patterns of the culture. To speak respectably and be regarded as an educated person are perhaps not very impressive ideals, but beyond them lie more impressive visions of being genuinely respectable and educated. The entry in the Evans book on genteel; gentle; Gentile points out that all three words are from the Latin gentilis, of the same clan or tribe. Some of the fun of reading usage books is watching the ceaseless quest for gentility inevitably undercut by the tendency of every euphemistic word, however delicate in inception, to become as vulgar as the word it supplants. Cuspidor was taken from the Portuguese as a refined way to say spittoon, and cemetery (“sleeping place”) was a nice euphemism for graveyard or boneyard. Privy (a place to be private) was succeeded by toilet (a place to dress), then bathroom, soon washroom and its Latin form lavatory, eventually powder room; yet the veneer never stays on for long. It is more delicate to say pluck than guts, although pluck too means intestines, and it is much more delicate to say “Poppycock!” than some coarser equivalent, although the Evanses assure us that it is a colloquial Dutch word for a cake of pap-shaped semi-liquid dung. These matters may be ultimately not in the dictionary but in the heart and mind, as the Evanses say, or buried deep in the culture’s history. Those not of the dominant clan, Marlene or Stuart, pursuing gentility or Gentility, might better pursue the truly gentle, that archaic characteristic of gentlefolk, and respect the language, like any tool, to keep it sharp. Perhaps a word has sensibilities too, like a Chinese, and is hurt when incorrectly addressed; perhaps even a word bleeds when you cut it.

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¹ Random House, 567 pp., $5.95.

² Oxford, 671 pp., $5.00.