He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.īrewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment." along with several other semi-synonyms.įowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers they were once considered essential. The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.
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