The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (review)

I spent many profitable hours reading this fascinating reference work, which contains more than four thousand headwords. The entries can be divided into two categories: (1) those that deal with language, editing, or writing, especially spelling, and (2) particular morphemes, including affixes. The cross-references are excellent: in looking up the ‘at’ sign (@), for example, one is directed to the letter a to discover that ‘this is a symbol in search of a name’(1); but its name is, in fact, the admittedly awkward ‘at sign’. Compare $ = ‘dollar sign’, and the ubiquitous # = ‘number/pound sign’.

Usage has been determined in accordance with two large databases: the British National Corpus and the Cambridge International Corpus. Pam Peters brings considerable experience to this project as its prototype was her Cambridge Australian English guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). As illustrative of what this publication has to offer, consider -able/-ible. I agree with the assertion that choosing one of these suffixes is ‘a challenge even for the successful speller’ (6). The following words take either suffix: collapsable, condensable, preventable, collectable, ignitable, and so on. The following are among the -ible-only words: audible, plausible, credible, and so on. (6). Another description of a suffix concerns Hebrew -im (268), as in the following loanwords: seraphim, kibbutzim, goyim, and cherubim. The databases affirm that cherubim means ‘divine messengers’, while cherubs refers to ‘angels in baroque art’ (268), and this is confirmed by The American Heritage Dictionary (AH4) (4th edn., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 319).

The overwhelming majority of the remarks are, in my view, accurate confirmations of current usages. Consider the word kudos ‘fame and public adoration’, about which P reveals that an American English singular backformation kudo has been cited, although it is rare (308). In another example, a computer mouse, she maintains, often pluralizes as mouses (360). This is correct, contra Steven Pinker (Words and rules: The ingredients of language, New York: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 174), who remarks that it is rare. But let me take up some matters in need of revision. In a discussion of ‘Hindi’ and ‘Hindu’ (249), P writes: ‘A Hindu is a person who speaks a Hindi language, or who adheres to the Brahmanistic religion of India’. First of all, Hindi is one language with many dialects. Second, a Hindu does not refer to a speaker of Hindi—neither in my dialect nor according to the definition given in AH4 (2000: 830) and the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) (1995:6781). Quite coincidentally, when offering cognates to English ‘one’ under the heading Indo-European, the Hindi word for ‘one’ is given incorrectly (277). The word is ēk (not ekt).

In discussing words that end in -o, P writes that Australian English has a repertoire of words formed in -o for people, such as wino ‘alcoholic’. The latter also occurs in American and British English (see CIDE 1995:1669).

Turning to orthographic matters, the Islamic holy book has four common spellings: Koran, Quran, Qur’an, and Qoran. The spelling (given twice) Qu’ran is incorrect (308). Related to this topic, under Islam we read that Islamism occurs in dictionaries as an alternative to Islam, ‘but there’s scant evidence for it in the databases’ (294). It occurs in AH4 (2000: 927) and in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996: 1011), but not in CIDE. I have never seen or heard it used.

Although this tome has a few imperfections, I recommend it as an indispensable collection of many interesting phenomena pertaining to contemporary usage.