DON'T SAY IT LIKE THAT

A legendary usage guide is turning a hundred.

- BY BEN YAGODA

Henry W. Fowler's hatred of pretension and love of precision won the admiration of The New Yorker's founding editor.

In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker's managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he was unhappy that, in two places in the piece, an editor had changed the word “but” to “however.” He made his case for a page and a half, and concluded, “But is a hell of a good word and we shouldn't high hat it.... In three letters it says a little of however, and also be that as it may, and also here’s something you weren't expecting and a number of other phrases along that line.” He signed the memo “St. Fowler McKelway.”

The “Fowler” was a joking reference to Henry W. Fowler, who, though not a saint in the magazine’s corridors, was certainly a great authority when it came to matters of grammar and style. A few years earlier, Wolcott Gibbs, another editor, had put together an internal document for new members of the staff titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It was a numbered list of thirty-one strictures, and in the penultimate one Gibbs wrote, “Fowler's English Usage is our reference book. But don't be precious about it.”

The source of what Kenneth Tynan later called the magazine's “Fowler fixation” was Harold Ross, who'd dreamed up the idea of