Talk:The King's English

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Ambiguous title[edit]

I eagerly await the sequel, The Pope's Catholic. 217.155.20.163 12:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Needs updating[edit]

This isn't a bad start, but I think that the book is more outdated and less useful than the article makes it out to be. Robert Burchfield comments in the preface to the third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage that some of Fowler's stipulations are "quirky, opinionated, and based on inadequate evidence". I happened to be reading my copy of King's English last night and I noticed that the Fowlers describe as offences quite a few usages which are, 102 years later, perfectly admissible. In that respect, anyone using the book as a usage guide in 2008 would be in danger of writing in an archaic and pedantic style that would draw attention to itself. On the other hand, the ambition of the book was to encourage more simplicity and less affectation, and if you look at most of the examples of bad journalistic English that the Fowlers quote, you can see that most serious contemporary journalists write more simply and clearly now than their counterparts did back then. In short, the book's work is done; or at any rate, something happened to cause journalists to write less affectedly. The article needs a bit more historical context, then, and some modern criticism of the book should be added. I am personally fond of it, but I don't trust it as a usage guide (even the first edition of Modern English Usage is more useful.) Lexo (talk) 11:35, 21 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Quotation marks[edit]

Shouldn't this article use 'single quotation marks', as The King's English itself suggests [1], rather than "doubles"? –The Fiddly Leprechaun · Catch Me! 22:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]