Language by Committee

MODERN AMERICAN USAGE by Wilson Follett. 436 pages. Hill & Wang. $7.50.

So many books on proper English usage already exist--Strunk, Fowler, Jespersen, Evans, Mencken--that the appearance of yet another is a case of meeting an unfelt need. One dependable authority in this field, like one telephone company, should be enough, and the English-speaking world has had one since British Lexicographer Henry W.

Fowler published Modern English Usage in 1926. That valuable reference, generously tinctured with the author's wit, has not been allowed to go out of date; it was revised only last year by Sir Ernest Gowers, himself an eminent lexicographer.

Wilson Follett, a sometime professor, magazine columnist and critic who undertook to write Modern American Usage in 1958, wanted "to do for the America of 1960 what Fowler had done for the England of 1926," but he died short of his goal five years later. His publishers, stuck with two-thirds of a book, surrendered it to a committee for completion. It was a rash decision, as General Motors' Charles F. Kettering could have told them. "If you want to kill any idea in the world today," he once said, "get a committee working on it." This committee was headed by Jacques Barzun, Columbia University's dean of faculty, who asked four-educators and a poet to help him.

Cookery Books. The poet, the pedants and the author of record have turned out a disappointing book. They do provide some useful information, such as the distinction between dock and pier (a boat floats in a dock, but is tied to a pier). Yet such pointers are overwhelmed by humorless pedagogy, prolixity, questionable advice, and an embarrassing number of sins against good usage and grammar.

The very first paragraph gets under way ungrammatically with the statement that "there is a right way to use words and construct sentences, and many wrong ways." Later on, after having stated that most verbs ending in -ize are "nearly all unnecessary and ill-formed," the text pops up with trivializing, signalize, actualize. It qualifies the absolute: fairly certain, virtual unanimity, quasi-universal. It insists that he betted on a horse is proper, speaks of cookery books, permits in case of fire but not in case of emergency. According to Follett--or the committee-margarine takes a hard g, and clothes, suggestion and chestnut should be pronounced cloes, sudjestion and chessnut.

Having used eight pages to warn against dangling participles (As reconstructed by the police. Smith denied all knowledge of the murder), the book commits at least two: In calling them defensives . . . the intimation is . . ., and In closing, it may he useful to suggest ... It deplores neologisms but scatters its own through the text: educationese, initialese, sequelant, beslang.

Although = Though. A persuasive case could probably be argued against the need for any guidebooks to good usage, but an airtight case could surely be marshaled against windy ones. William Strunk Jr.'s succinct Elements of Style (71 pages; TIME, July 13, 1959) does not waste time, for example, on the nonexistent difference between although and though; Modern American Usage squanders 750 words on the subject, concludes: "There is not much to be lost by treating the two words as interchangeable and not much to be gained by attempts to differentiate them."

In closing, it may be useful to sudjest that there is a right way to compile a book on language usage and many wrong ways. It is fairly certain that Modern American Usage will not signalize quasi-universal rejection of Fowler.

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