Volume 5, Number 2 · August 26, 1965
The Language Barrier
By F.W. Bateson
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
by H.W. Fowler, Second Edition, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers
Oxford, 725 pp., $5.00
The Careful Writer
by Theodore M. Bernstein
Atheneum, 487 pp., $7.95
A Dictionary of Usage and Style
by Roy H. Copperud
Hawthorn, 452 pp., $6.95
'We and the Americans have much in common, but there is always the language barrier.' I suppose the little joke—it is Oscar Wilde's—still gets its little laugh. Whenever two countries, or two regions or two classes for that matter, share a single language, they will inevitably become hyperbolic if in this or that detail the other's linguistic identity is less than complete. But British English and American English have got used to each other since Wilde's day. We are not even particularly funny to each other any longer, although our respective accents—the great stand-by of the comic raconteur when I came to Harvard as a graduate student nearly forty years ago—cannot have changed very much.
Review, 2636 words
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