34.3356, Review: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition: Garner (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3356. Wed Nov 08 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3356, Review: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition: Garner (2023)

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Date: 09-Nov-2023
From: Adrian Stenton [a.j.stenton at hum.leidenuniv.nl]
Subject: English: Garner (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3740

AUTHOR: Bryan A Garner
TITLE: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Adrian Stenton

SUMMARY
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the publication of the fifth
edition of Bryan Garner’s ‘Garner’s Modern English Usage’ in 2022 is
that it appeared a mere six years after the fourth edition of 2016.
First published in 1998 as ‘A Dictionary of Modern American Usage’, it
underwent revision in 2003, 2009, and 2016, so maybe we shouldn’t be
too surprised at this continuation of the six-year cycle. It dropped
‘A Dictionary of’ from the title and adopted ‘Garner’s’ from the
second edition of 2003, and subsequently revised ‘American’ to
‘English’ with the fourth edition of 2016. Garner notes in his
‘Preface’ to the fourth edition: “With this new edition, Oxford
University Press has decided to rename the book ‘Garner’s Modern
English Usage’ – using ‘English’ instead of ‘American’. That change
restores what had been the idea behind the first edition. The implied
global emphasis of ‘English’ makes more sense today than ever before,
given the book’s broadly inclusive approach to World English, not just
to American English and British English” (2016, p. ix). Garner’s
Oxford stable-mate, ‘Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage’,
took eighty-nine years to appear in its four editions (1926, 1965,
1996, 2015), under a range of editors: Fowler (1926), Gowers (1965),
Burchfield (1996), and Butterfield (2015), which remains the current
edition. Has the language, or Garner’s view of it, really changed so
much in six years? For this review, I had access to the first (1998),
fourth (2016) and fifth (2022) editions, and to expert reviews of the
fourth edition by Robin Straaijer (2018), of the third edition by
Matthijs Smits (2017), and of the first edition by Robert S. Wachal
(2000), who presented a comparative review of Garner (1998) and a new
edition of Strunk and White’s ‘Elements of Style’ (2000, fourth
edition). In this review of Garner’s fifth edition, I will therefore
concentrate on the differences between it and the fourth edition, to
see whether, as noted by Wachal of Strunk and White: “[t]here is so
little revision in this new edition … that owners of earlier editions
should not purchase it” (2000, p. 199). It should also be noted that,
in that same review, Wachal was partly positive about the first
edition of Garner: “I may well have been unduly harsh in commenting on
the book’s shortcomings. In truth, it does contain an enormous amount
of useful and indisputable information” (2000, p. 207). Does this
remain the case with the fifth edition?

REVIEW
Garner himself doesn’t say much about his fifth edition, but does
include “[e]very page has been reworked or confirmed by using the
extraordinary help of big data” (2022, p. xiv). The publisher’s blurb
on the inside front cover adds “[w]ith new material on every page and
more than 1,500 new entries” (2022, ifc). Neither Garner nor the
publisher make any claims about the total number of entries.

Garner does, however, make much of his use of ‘big data’: “The use of
big data in these pages doubtless makes ‘Garner’s Modern English
Usage’ the most thoroughly empirical work of its kind” (2022, p. xi).
This focus on empiricism has been a constant theme for Garner. In the
‘Preface’ to his first edition, he refers to the “voluminous
linguistic evidence” based on “a greater corpus of current published
writings than any usage guide ever before published” (1998, pp.
xii–xiii). However, the nature of that empiricism has changed over
time. Smits notes that in the second edition Garner “expanded his
linguistic evidence by offering additional examples” (2017, p. 225),
while the third edition “introduced a ‘Language-Change Index’, which
tries to give an indication of (non-)acceptability for different usage
entries” (2017, p. 223). For the fourth edition, Straaijer notes that
“[t]he most significant innovation in lexicographic methodology … is
the use of Google Books in combination with Google’s ngrams
application” (2018, p. 39), and this continues with the fifth edition,
with the Google Books Ngram Viewer now providing access to data from
2019, rather than from 2012 as in the fourth edition. Garner is thus
able to use the relative word and phrase frequencies of variant forms
to show that, for example, in that seven-year period, the “[c]urrent
ratio in print” of ‘different from’ vs. ‘different than’ has changed
from 11:1 to 8:1. (It remains at Stage 3 in the Language Change Index;
i.e. “[t]he form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated
people, but it’s still avoided in careful usage” (2022, p. xxv).) He
does not provide comparative data for ‘different to’. These figures
suggest that more language users are gradually adopting ‘different
than’ over ‘different from’, though it is not possible to say from
Garner’s data whether these variants differ systematically in
different syntactic contexts, with ‘different than’ being used more
clause-initially, as he notes in the text (2022, p. 329). This is not
to criticise Garner – he is after all primarily presenting a text for
readers seeking guidance on usage – but this and similar nuggets could
easily lead to an interesting research project. There are some
difficulties with the use of Garner’s current ratio, which will be
discussed below, but first, what of the 1,500 new entries mentioned in
the cover blurb?

I trawled through the letter ‘L’ to see what had been added. There are
sixty new entries, that is, entries that were not in the fourth
edition of 2016. The first such new entry is for ‘labradoodle’, which
has a definition cross-reference (i.e. no information is provided at
‘labradoodle’ itself) to ‘portmanteau words’. At ‘portmanteau words’,
‘labradoodle’ is listed as one of fifty-six examples of such words.
Now ‘labradoodle’ is also listed as an example of a portmanteau word
in the fourth edition (2016, p. 711), but does not have its own entry
under ‘L’. The other example of a portmanteau word beginning with ‘L’
in the fifth edition is ‘listicle’, but this does not have its
own-place entry under ‘L’. The fourth edition does not include
‘listicle’ under ‘portmanteau words’, but does include ‘liger’, which
has been dropped from the fifth edition. The fifth edition also
includes the additional information that ‘labradoodle’ has been in use
since 1996. Interesting, but is this what the reader is looking for in
a usage guide?

There are eleven such definition cross-references among the new
entries in the fifth edition. The next one, alphabetically, is
‘lacey’, which is cross-referred to ‘lacy’. At ‘lacy’ we are told that
‘lacey’ is a variant, and that the current ratio for ‘lacy:*lacey’ is
15:1 (the asterisk denotes a “solecism” or a “nonrecommended variant”;
2022, p. xiii). While ‘lacey’ does not have its own-place entry in the
2016 edition, it is listed under ‘lacy’, again with the asterisk, with
a current ratio of 19:1. As with ‘different than’, it would seem that
‘lacey’ has been gaining ground in the seven years between 2012 and
2019, despite being “nonrecommended”.

Given these sixty new entries in ‘L’, does this support the
publisher’s claim that there are 1,500 new entries? ‘L’ makes up 38
pages of the book’s total of 1,187 main text pages, or 3.2%. Pro-rata,
this would suggest 1,875 new entries, so the claim looks to be
accurate. It does, however, as the above examples show, depend
somewhat on what you count as a new entry. The question also arises as
to whether these new entries add much to the book over the fourth
edition.

Garner’s sixty new entries include the trio ‘lachrymator’, ‘lacrimal’,
and ‘lacrimation’. These are perhaps less frequent words than might be
expected in a usage guide, and ones that a reader might not
necessarily have a problem with, other than spelling. For reasons that
will soon become clear, I will here focus on ‘lacrimal’. Garner’s
(2022, p. 644) entry for this is:

“‘lacrimal’ (= of, relating to, or involving tears or tear-producing
glands), a Latin loanword dating in English from the 1400s, has been
the predominant spelling in all varieties of English since the 1920s.
The older spelling, ‘*lachrymal’, has dried up since its heyday of
1740 to 1918.
What’s the difference between ‘lacrimal’ and ‘lachrymose’? The first
is anatomical, the second emotive.
Current ratio in print (‘lacrimal’ vs. ‘*lachrymal’): 16:1”

This all seems to be straightforward enough, until it is compared with
the entry from its stable-mate ‘Fowler’ (Butterfield, 2015, p. 459):

“‘lachrymose’ (and related words, e.g. ‘lachrymal’). Now always spelt
with ‘lachry-’ though this group of words all answer to Latin
‘lacrima’ ‘tear’ …”

Here, then, we have two usage guides, from the same publisher, broadly
contemporaneous, coming to diametrically opposed conclusions. What is
the reader, seeking usage advice, to make of this? As we have seen,
Garner makes great use of data from the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Butterfield, in his introductory ‘A revision for the twenty-first
century’ for his fourth edition of ‘Fowler’, notes that he “made use
of the ‘Oxford English Corpus’ … [which] contains over 2.5 billion
words” and which was assembled specifically “for the purpose of
linguistic research” (2015, p. viii). This enabled him to investigate
variant frequencies in different registers and varieties of English.
This corpus was also used by the editors of the ‘Concise Oxford
Dictionary’ (Soanes and Stevenson, 2008, revised eleventh edition, p.
795), who duly note that the two forms ‘lachrymal’ and ‘lacrimal’ tend
to be used in different registers:

“‘lachrymal’ /PRON/ (also ‘lacrimal’ or ‘lacrymal’) adj. 1 [formal or
literary] connected with weeping or tears. 2 (‘lacrimal’) [Physiology
& Anatomy] concerned with the secretion of tears. …”

Here, the position taken is that in general use ‘lachrymal’ is more
common, which is reflected but not stated in ‘Fowler’, whilst in
scientific use the more common form is ‘lacrimal’, a position taken
but not stated in Garner (but note Garner’s distinction between
‘lacrimal’ and ‘lachrymose’, and that Garner does not include
‘lacrymal’ at all).

This brings us back to one of the criticisms made by Straaijer of the
use of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Straaijer mentions that one of
the problems with the Ngram Viewer is that “[a]lthough it can be used
to calculate ratios of two or more variant uses, as Garner does, these
ratios cannot always be taken at face value (as he seems to do)”
(2018, p. 40). The main problem that Straaijer raises is that of
polysemy in one of the variants, and he notes that contextual
information is needed to resolve this. He also notes, however, that
the co-text and context needed for this are available “only in a
limited way, since Google Books was not designed for linguistic
inquiry at this level of detail” (2018, p. 40). These limitations of
the Google Books Ngram Viewer are by now quite well known (see, for
example, Zhang, 2015; a useful overview is given on Wikipedia: Google
Ngram Viewer). One of the specific issues noted by Zhang was a
reliance on an “[o]verabundance of scientific literature” (2015). This
might explain the different conclusions reached by Garner and
Butterfield.

Another aspect of Garner’s current ratio in print is that it reveals
relative, but not absolute frequencies. So, we don’t know the actual
number of examples of a variant, nor do we know the size of the sample
(i.e. the corpus). So, is 1:1 free variation? Is 10:1 significant?
100:1? In short, we don’t know if these figures are significant.

However, we shouldn’t conclude from this that the Google Books Ngram
Viewer is unsuitable for language research. In fact, it is also used
by the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ (‘OED’) as one source for their
frequency data, but they note that: “Historical frequency series are
derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on a
corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and
2010. The Ngrams data has been cross-checked against frequency
measures from other corpora, and re-analysed in order to handle
homographs and other ambiguities.” The ‘OED’ also provides (absolute)
frequency information, and an analysis of this shows the relative
frequencies of ‘lacrimal’ vs. ‘lachrymal’ in 2010 to be 16.9:1, a
figure not a million miles away from Garner’s current ratio.

It might be instructive in this regard to consider other usage guides.
One guide that does provide register information for ‘lachrymal’ vs.
‘lacrimal’ is another one from Oxford, ‘The Oxford Dictionary for
Writers and Editors’ (Allen et al., 1981, p. 218), which notes:

“‘lachrym/al’, of tears; ‘-ation’, ‘-atory’, ‘-ose’; not ‘lacry-’;
‘lacri-’ is a correct form, now usual in scientific use”

I found the entry for this in the HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English)
database, held as part of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project at the
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (see e.g. Straaijer, 2014,
2015, and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2020, on this). HUGE is a searchable
database of seventy-seven usage guides published in the UK and the US
between 1770 and 2010, and my search revealed that only a handful of
usage guides include an entry on ‘lachrymal’. Of the seventy-seven
guides in HUGE, apart from those cited above, only nine included such
an entry, and only one of them was not published by Oxford. The
exception is Mager et al.’s ‘Prentice Hall Encyclopedic Dictionary of
English Usage’ (1993, p. 208), which includes: “‘lachrymal’,
‘lacrimal’, ‘lacrymal’ of tears. (adj.) –matory, –mose.” This suggests
that the three forms are in free variation.

This search result would suggest that the spelling of ‘lachrymal’ is
not seen as a major issue by most of the usage guides contained in the
HUGE database. This and a number of other new entries in the fifth
edition of Garner could be seen as an opportunity to introduce more
relative frequency data simply because it was available. This
inclusion in Garner of entries which might not typically find their
way into a usage guide has also been noted from the first edition
right through to the fourth: “One reason for the length of the Oxford
book is its inclusion of many straight dictionary items” (Wachal,
2000, p. 203); “there are many entries in Garner4 that do not require
a specialised dictionary of usage but that could have been dealt with
in a traditional dictionary” (Straaijer, 2018, p. 39), although
Straaijer does preface his analysis with the comment “as in other
usage guides”.

Another feature of Garner that has been commented on throughout is the
continuity of his presentation of various entries: “Between the three
editions of GMAU, Garner maintains the same advice for all usage
entries under investigation” (Smits, 2017, p. 225); “Garner’s
prescription for the use of ‘disinterested’ in the sense of
‘uninterested’ has not changed since Garner1” (Straaijer, 2018, p.
42). This is also the case with my own research on ‘these/those
kind/sort/type of’, where Garner’s treatment has barely changed over
the five editions (Stenton, in progress).

EVALUATION
It is, of course, not possible to provide a comprehensive evaluation
of a 1,300-page reference book in a 3,000-word review. I have, of
necessity, looked at a tiny fraction of Garner’s book, and it would be
nonsensical to make an overall evaluation of this new edition on this
basis. What I can say is that I remain puzzled by the book, in terms
of both what it is trying to do, and who it is doing it for. Is it
really a usage guide, or is it a language reference book? If the
former, then there are many other usage guides on the market, many of
them also from Oxford, which are more accessible, for example
‘Fowler’s Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage’ (2016) , also
edited by Butterfield (and what Garner’s book is crying out for as a
usage guide is a concise edition). If the latter, then Wachal’s
summation still holds, in that it does indeed include “an enormous
amount of useful … information”, but perhaps without his
“indisputable”. But to return to my original question: if you have the
fourth edition is it worth buying the fifth? As a usage guide, then
no; as a language reference source, then yes.

REFERENCES
Allen, R.E., Edmonds, D.J., and Sykes, J.B. (eds). 1981. The Oxford
Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Burchfield, R.W. (ed.). 1996 third edition. Fowler’s Modern English
Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butterfield, Jeremy (ed.). 2015 fourth edition. Fowler’s Dictionary of
Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butterfield, Jeremy (ed.). 2016 third edition. Fowler’s Concise
Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fowler, H.W. 1926. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Garner, Bryan A. 1998. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. New
York. Oxford University Press.
Garner, Bryan A. 2003 second edition. Garner’s Modern American Usage.
New York. Oxford University Press.
Garner, Bryan A. 2009 third edition. Garner’s Modern American Usage.
New York. Oxford University Press.
Garner, Bryan A. 2016 fourth edition. Garner’s Modern English Usage.
New York. Oxford University Press.
Gowers, Sir Ernest (ed.). 1965 second edition. A Dictionary of Modern
English Usage by H.W. Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mager, Nathan H. and Mager, Sylvia K. 1993 second edition, edited by
John Domini [1974]. Prentice Hall Encyclopedic Dictionary of English
Usage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Oxford English Dictionary. Online <https://www.oed.com/>.
Smits, Matthijs. 2017. ‘Garnering’ Respect? The Emergence of Authority
in the American Usage Tradition. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and
Carol Percy (eds). Prescription and Tradition in Language:
Establishing Standards across Time and Space (pp. 221–237). Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Soanes, Catherine and Stevenson, Angus (eds). 2008 revised eleventh
edition [2004]. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Stenton, Adrian. In progress. These kind of words: Number Agreement in
the Species Noun Phrase in International Academic English.
Straaijer, Robin. 2014. The Hyper Usage Guide of English. Online
<http://huge.ullet.net>.
Straaijer, Robin. 2015. The Hyper Usage Guide of English Database:
User Manual. Online
<https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/hugedb/huge-user-manual/>.
Straaijer, Robin. 2018. Modern English Usage from Britain to America.
English Today 34(4), 39–47.
Strunk, William Jr. and White, E.B. 2000 fourth edition [1959]. The
Elements of Style. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2020. Describing Prescriptivism: Usage
Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Wachal, Robert S. 2000. Review of Two Handbooks on Style and Usage:
Strunk and White (2000) and Garner (1998). American Speech 75(2),
199–207.
Zhang, Sarah. 2015. The pitfalls of using Google Ngram to study
language. Wired 12 October 2015. Online <https://www.wired.com/2015/10
/pitfalls-of-studying-language-with-google-ngram/>.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Adrian Stenton is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for
Linguistics. He is studying number agreement in the species noun
phrase in a corpus of academic writing, in the context of usage guide
advice from 1770 to 2010.



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