This volume explores both historical and current issues in English usage guides or style manuals. Chapters look at how and why these guides are compiled, and by whom; what sort of advice they contain; how they differ from grammars and dictionaries; and how attitudes to usage have changed.

• 1: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Introduction


• 2: Robin Straaijer: The usage guide: Evolution of a genre


• 3: Pam Peters: The lexicography of English usage


• 4: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: The King's English by Kingsley Amis: A publisher's project


• 5: Rebecca Gowers: Even more complete plain words


• 6: David Crystal: Punch as a satirical usage guide


• 7: Morana Lukä: From usage guides to language blogs


• 8: John Allen: Why does the BBC need a style guide?


• 9: Carmen Ebner: Attitudes to British usage


• 10: Viktorija Kostadinova: Usage problems in American English


• 11: Geoffrey K. Pullum: The usage game: Catering for perverts


• References


• Index

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research interests include the final stages of English standardization - the codification of grammar and the rise and spread of prescriptivism - and the question of how grammar rules relate to actual usage. Her published work includes An Introduction to Late Modern English (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and, with OUP, The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (2011) and In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters (2014).