Page:Text, type and style; a compendium of Atlantic usage.djvu/16

4 it discusses, almost exclusively, such matters of typography and style, and, to some extent, of syntax, as have been brought to the author's attention in his work on the copy and proofs of the "Atlantic" during nearly seventeen years, and of Atlantic books since such things have been. The result is, necessarily, that some points are omitted which are quite as important as some that are included. There has been no attempt to make an exhaustive list of words often inaccurately used, or of questionable constructions. The conditions under which the work has been done have been such that the preparation of such a list would have meant simply drawing without stint from one or more of the general textbooks on English, or from such a work as "The King's English."

There is a vast difference between "drawing without stint" from the last-mentioned work and using it freely, as the author has done. It is an inexhaustible mine of instruction combined with entertainment; only the surface of it has been scratched by extracting the passages quoted in the following pages; and if their perusal shall lead readers to resort to this volume of the Messrs. Fowler,—authors, also, of the compact and useful little "Concise English Dictionary," based upon the monumental "New English Dictionary," —the present book will have served at least one worthy purpose. The writer has turned to "The