Mastering English

From a review of the film A Serious Man:-

Perhaps the most masterful thing the Coen brothers achieved in this film was to slip so much death into it without anybody noticing – a bit like life.

From a blurb about a book on roses:-

This masterful work is the definitive grower's guide to the buying, planting, propagation, feeding and pruning of the important Hybrids, Shrub Roses and Climbers.

From Current English Usage:- (not so current now, 1962)

Incorrect.  Masterly is required.  Masterful means ‘assertive, strong-willed, determined to be a master,.  Masterly means “skilful”, in the manner of one who is a master of his craft.”

I wonder if the difference between the words will be sustained or will they go the way of “uninterested” and “disinterested”.  I can see masterly disappearing and masterful coming to mean both assertive, “a masterful man” and skilful, “a masterful performance.”

Current English Usage like all good reference books is a lively read for aficionados, with sensible advice on grammar, punctuation and vocabulary.  I also enjoy Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English, which is both prescriptive and entertaining.   It’s out in a new edition.

the book surely is a well-preserved “monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” But it’s much more than that, of course. More than a million copies of Fowler’s have been sold; it is simply, to recall Burchfield’s words, “the Bible of prescriptivists.” And, for all its early- 20th-century, southern English stuffiness, it remains today more than capable, when touched up by a few well-placed tweaks, of fulfilling its original purpose of telling us when and how we can say something and when and how we can’t.

Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English is pretty good as well, both in its advice and its light touch.  I’m glad to see that the ultra-cool Mr Unspeakable himself recommends it at the end of a snippet in which he out pedants a would-be but mistaken pedant, Oliver Kamm.

Language nuts are never happier than when catching out someone whose writing they don’t admire giving misapplied advice on vocabulary or grammar or style.   Be man enough to boldly split your infinitives! Prepositions at the end of sentences are something you’ll just have to put up with.

They abolished the study of English grammar at my high school the year after I started.  It was one of my favourite subjects.  You would think – at least I do think – that how the language we speak and write works is as fundamentally interesting for anyone with curiosity as, for instance, where their ancestors came from. 

How I would love to own this book. 

 

 (It's the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English (Hardcover) which tells you how words were used in different times.)

Yikes, it’s £206.29 from Amazon.

Comments

[Flesh]

Christmas is coming. You could set up a paypal appeal.

[Rosie]

Hmm I think that might generate enough to buy one page, in fact one nano-short definition of a word which has practically no history. Eg "paypal".

[Sarah]

When I first read your comment I found it difficult to think exactly how I would use those words. But later I reflected that I definitely do use 'masterful' in the wrong way. I asked my husband to define 'masterful' and it turned out he also used it wrongly. And we've both got PhDs in English! The disinterested/uninterested thing really annoys me even though logically I accept that a word's meaning is ultimately defined by usage rather than by what the dictionary says.

[Rosie]

Well there are synonyms for both "masterful" and "masterly" so it's not all loss. As we are told, languages change.

However, the sentences "he was masterly in bed" and "he was masterful in bed" should conjure up different, if not mutually exclusive, ways of going about things.

"Disinterested" is a loss, though. I don't think "impartial" is exactly the same.