Fowler's Modern English Usage

Second Edition hardcover gray cloth with gilt spine titling. Very Good clean copy with no writing or marks. There is light foxing on the top edge, Dust jacket has edge chips and small tears, spine faded. Revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers.In essentials, Fowler's Modern English Usage can never be out of date, for his primary concern was to teach clear thinking and the orderly use of precise words, and to castigate whatever is slovenly, pretentious, or pedantic. But the conventions of grammar and vocabulary that he called "usage" never stand still...Constructions condemned as offensive or improper have forced their way into idiom; "slipshod extensions" have found a respected place in our vocabulary; "vogue words" have fallen out of fashion and others have taken their places; "popularized technicalities" have proliferated.The alterations and additions made in this revision represent an attempt to do what we may suppose Fowler himself would have wished to do, if he had been alive today, to keep his book abreast of present-usage. The publication in the meantime of other Oxford works of reference has made it possible to find room for new material by omitting a number of articles that Fowler put in merely for definition. There are also many new comparisons between British and American usage and pronunciation.