Fowler

Yesterday as MBH and had a little wait time and we read the introduction (or preface or something) of a second edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. I love Fowler. He's so snooty. He's the kind of person that you'd hope would catch you doing something wrong, because it would be so much fun to hear him correct and criticize you. The preface talked about how idiosyncratic he was, and that's what's fun about reading him. I used to use a second edition at work, and one entry I liked was "respectively". Let me quote a little for you:

"respective(ly). Delight in these words is a widespread but depraved taste. Like soldiers and policemen, they have work to do, but, when the work is not there, the less we see of them the better; of ten sentences in which they occur, nine would be improved by their removal. The evil is considerable enough to justify an examination at some length."

...which he proceeds to give. Aside from right uses, there are foolproof uses ("The particular fool for whose benefit each r. is inserted will be defined in brackets), tautological uses, unintelligible uses (my favorite, for example "The writing-room, silence-room and recreation-room have respectively blue and red arm-chairs") and so on. More than a full page...which has been removed in the third edition, which I got at work recently. Too bad. The editor of the third edition says that "His comments are sound bu their present-day relevance is uncertain. I have found not evidence of such misuese of respectively in the 1990's." What a shame.