The New Fowler's Modern English Usage

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by James Bowman

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that Burchfield will allow us in the above both the old-fashioned use of "deprecatory" ("it is still desirable to keep in mind the distinction," he says, between "deprecate" and "depreciate") and the masculine unmarked gender --the latter on the grounds that its automatic replacement by "he or she" will not be mandatory until "the whole community singly and collectively decides" to make it so. Permissiveness, it seems, can also work in favor of defiant traditionalists. But for the most part, it is nothing more than an evasion of intellectual responsibility. Burchfield is not exactly hostile to a more stringent sense of this responsibility; it's more that he is old and tired and sick of the trouble of enforcing the rules in an anti-authoritarian age.

For instance, although Fowler (who has clearly become nothing more than a brand name) censured as "illiterate" the common use of "due to" as a prepositional phrase meaning "because of," his redactor notes that "hostility to the construction is an entirely 20c. phenomenon" and that now "opinion remains sharply divided" on the matter. To him, "it begins to look as if this use of 'due to' will form part of the natural language of the 21c, as one more example of a forgotten battle." Yet the battle will never truly be forgotten for so long as there is anyone left who remembers that the usage was once considered coarse and, well, illiterate. Even though we refrain (an "invisible" subjunctive) from censoriousness or snobbery, if we avoid the construction ourselves as grating on the cultivated ear, is not our fastidiousness itself a reproach to those who simply know no better?

Ultimately, neither elegance nor error are to be wished away by no-fault grammarians such as Burchfield. I imagine him as a well-meaning de-colonizer who leaves behind him a humane and enlightened constitution even though he knows that corrupt and bloodthirsty natives will tear it up within a week of his departure. At least he has done his bit. His hands are clean. But neither has he made life any better, or shown anyone how to write well.