Henry Watson Fowler > Quotes

“Pretentious quotations [are] the surest road to tedium.”
― Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

“An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”
― H. W. Fowler

“Anyone who uses that phrase [between you and I] lives in a grammarless cavern.”
― Henry Watson Fowler

“If there is method here, it is hard to discern it. Let it be repeated: the use of capitals is a matter not or rules but of taste; but consistency is at least not a mark of bad taste.”
― H. W. Fowler

“ mesembrianthemum should be so spelt. In a cumbrous word whose length can only be excused if it is at least significant to the learned, it is absurd not to correct the misspelling y for i; the y at once puts the Greek scholar off the track by suggesting embryo or bryony (Greek βρύω swell, burgeon), and forbids him to think of μεσημβρία noon, which is what he ought to be thinking of. When a word like rhyme that is familiar to everyone has settled itself into our hearts and minds with a wrong spelling, there is much to be said for refraining from correction; but with the y of m. no one has tender associations.”
― Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage