Check your "Fowler's"....

I have a confession to make: I love our language. Our bastard, spoiled, rule-breaking son-of-a-bitch of a language. Our barroom, locker-room, newsroom language. Our 'lite' language, our media language, our ad-copy language. The language sung in our favorite songs, misused in our beer ads, overused in our sophomoric poetry. I love language, and I delight in our trainwreck of a melting-pot of a mixed-metaphor of a language!

And when you enjoy something (music, movies, food) you look to the process (the guitar, the camera, the spoon). I've therefore spent most of my life reading grammar guides, style books, thesauri. I have a small library of books about writing, books of forgotten words, books about, er, books.

My bible, turned to daily for spiritual guidance, is my 20-plus year old, well loved, well stained American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. (Years ago I got in the habit of making a small tick next to any word I looked up, now roughly 9 out of 10 pages (in a random sampling I just did) have at least one check).

I cherish my old friends Bill Strunk and E. B. White, and turn to them often for corrections on those little rules I never remember.

From Chicago I get the journalist's bible (and the coolest title) the Manual of Style.
Seriously, how cool is that? It should be the name of a Miles Davis album. "Miles Davis, the Manual of Style".

But the one guide I truly cherish, the one that always leaves a smile in the back of my mind, the one I don't turn to often enough is H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage. Most often simply referred to as Fowler's, it lives by itself with a nice pension in a little cottage just off the Oxford grounds.

It is fastidiously accurate. It is a model of efficiency. It is even, in it's own way, playful (if occasionally cantankerous).

I decided to write this little blog after coming across the following entry while I was thumbing through my copy this morning. It stood out from the other entries concerning correct use of onomatopoeia, the differences between Jacobean, Jacobin, and Jacobite, what etc. really means and when/how it should be used. It is a wonderful example of everything about Fowler's that I love (and by a beautifully circular 'meta-' process, everything I love about our language). It is simple, it is direct, it is even a bit (playfully?) dismissive:

superstitions. Among the most enduring of the superstitions or myths about our language are these: sentences should not begin with and or but; sentences should not end with a preposition; and infinitives should not be 'split'. For further examples of such beliefs, see FETISHES.

Sublime!
(A word I use a little too often; I've yet to find a suitable synonym).