Lexicographer Henry Watson Fowler, born in Tonbridge, Kent, England (1858-1933), studied at Oxford and taught Latin, Greek, and English at a boy's school in northwest England for 17 years, before resigning and moving to a tiny island in the English Channel (Guernsey), building himself a one room cottage, and turning into a hermit. There he spent all his time writing enough essays to fill two book length manuscripts but he couldn't get them published. Until one day he had an idea...
He would write: "a sort of English composition manual, from the negative point of view, for journalists & amateur writers." So, collaborating with his brother, he wrote The King's English (1906), published by Oxford University Press. It begins:
"Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid."
The first chapter, entitled "Vocabulary," lays out the following principles:
"Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
Prefer the short word to the long.
Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance."
The book was a success and he was commissioned to produce more. His biggest success was A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), a collection of common mistakes in English, organized into categories. Things like: "Battered Ornaments," "Love of the Long Word," "Sturdy Indefensibles," "Swapping Horses," and "Unequal Yokefellows."
T. S. Eliot said, "Every person who wishes to write ought to read A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ... for a quarter of an hour every night before going to bed."
So there.
