Revising Fowler’s Modern English Usage

Abstract

The final years of Gowers’ life were spent at Rondle Wood, revising Fowler’s Modern English Usage (MEU) as well as providing a welcome holiday retreat for many friends, his children and grandchildren. After his successes with Plain Words and its successors, Cambridge University awarded Gowers an honorary Doctor of Letters. Gowers was introduced at the degree ceremony with the words:

I present to you in plain words the indefatigable opponent of administrative and governmental incomprehensibility, the ardent champion of the devocabularisation of words like devocabularisation, the tireless and eloquent defender of the principle that intelligent rulers should be able to make intelligible rules. It is a subject on which he can speak with authority born of much experience; for it is more than fifty years since he exchanged the austere discipline of prose composition in the Classical Tripos for the unbridled luxuriance of English as she is writ in Government offices.¹