During the latter half of the Second World War, Ludovic, the deranged and upwardly mobile murderer of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, becomes 'an addict of that potent intoxicant, the English language'. He begins an obsessive study of books about words, and starts to write a volume of pensées (a piss-take of Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave). 'Not laboriously, luxuriously rather, Ludovic worked over his notebooks, curtailing, expanding, polishing; often consulting Fowler, not disdaining Roget; writing and rewriting in his small clerkly hand on the lined sheets of paper which the army supplied.' The Fowler referred to here is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler, usually known as Fowler's Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, and now brought out in a third edition, completely rewritten by the lexicographer Robert Burchfield.

LRB 2 January 1997 | PDF Download