A Hardy Myth
A reply to Bruce Gilley.
The grammarian H.W. Fowler is worthy of commemoration. His Dictionary of Modern English Usage, the centenary of whose publication falls this year, has had an outsized cultural impact in the English-speaking world. Its edicts live on in the style guides of many newspapers, including the New York Times. Unfortunately Bruce Gilley’s celebration of Fowler in these pages goes well beyond the evidence, and sometimes in perplexing ways.
Guarding the Gates of Our Language
“Women having the vote reduces men’s political power.” If this sentence offends you, then take heart: you are not alone. Like generations of people who have fought for a better world, you recognise it as a grievous sin against proper English usage, one of thousands detailed in Henry Watson Fowler’s
Gilley misunderstands basic aspects of English grammar and misrepresents the approach of scholarly linguists to Fowler’s enterprise. Further, he invokes the authority of Fowler to urge “the importance of gatekeeping” and arresting “cultural decay … by holding the linguistic vandals at bay.” This aim is quixotic, misguided and corrosive. And it’s not the type of philosophy I’d expect to find in Quillette, which stands for science, critical inquiry, and—in the broadest sense—liberalism.
Let’s start with a point of agreement. There’s much to admire in Fowler. He was a stylish writer who knew a lot about grammar, as did his reviser Sir Ernest Gowers. As a journalist, I’ve sometimes found it useful to cite Fowler’s sensible defence of split infinitives and other purported grammatical errors. But his linguistic judgments were often otherwise eccentric. Amazingly, Gilley expounds (inaccurately) and extols possibly the single most perverse of all Fowler’s idées fixes, the so-called “possessive with gerunds” rule.
Fowler’s own example of the purported solecism he seeks to correct is: “Women having the vote reduces men’s political power.” He claims this type of construction is “grammatically indefensible.” Why? In Gilley’s telling, it’s because it involves “using the participle ‘having’ as a noun (a verbal noun or gerund) without modifying ‘women’ to its adjectival form ‘women’s’.” Hence it is mandatory (not merely optional) to write instead “women’s having the vote…”
