The New Fowler's Modern English Usage

Authors: H.W. Fowler & R.W. Burchfield
Rough Price: $35 pb, $75 hc
Edition: Third (1996)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0-19-860506-4 pb, 0-19-860263-4 hc

Fowler is the definitive style and grammar book on the market, and has been since the first edition was published in 1926. It's dictionary-style entries explain everything from proper usage of the word 'the' to 'sub specie aeternitatis'. In the first few days after I bought it, I was reading it on public transport, re-learning my own language. Indeed, now that I have it sitting beside me whenever I'm writing, I wonder how I lived without it. Fowler is also an entertaining read in itself. For example:

I. a. The regrettable type between you and I must be condemned at once. Anyone who uses it now lives in a grammarless cavern in which no distinction is recogized between grammatical object and a subject.

Well, it made me laugh anyway. Make sure to check out the entry for 'longest word'. Antidisestablishmentarianism is not the longest word in the English language.

Tim Baxter