Of gerunds, participles and other felicities

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Meticulous: ever-scrupulous about minute details, very careful, accurate. This definition of the word is one that I thought correct, for it comes from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English with which, in 1964, I replaced the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of 1946 that I had at school, inscribed with my name and form, VIb Modern. It is certainly the sense in which I have always used the word, but by chance, in my dotage, I learn that I have been in error all these years. I was, as ever, on the dilatory District line from Wimbledon, turning the pages of Fowler's Modern English Usage after a minor spat with an editor over the distinction between a gerund and a participle, seeking proof that I was right. Do not mock - the book is small enough to be a vade mecum in such crowded circumstances, suitable to be read in snatches, as I was once innocent enough to say of Fanny Hill at a literary gathering in New York.

On matters of syntax I surrender to no one but a single sub-editor on the Evening Standard, a woman whose instinctive grasp of grammatical perfection is unequalled there, and to Fowler, the most masterly of lexicographers. Fowler proved me right and, triumphant, I turned to page-flipping at Parsons Green until the translation of a Latin sentence caught my eye and made me laugh out loud - "was ever man in such a funk? Lord how my teeth chatter." And what were the Latin words for "in a funk"? There was just one, meticulosus, from which British journalists of no Latinity - a particular target for Fowler's venom - have mistakenly invented its current meaning. "It means," says the scornful Fowler, "not what journalists make it mean (we have scrupulous and punctilious for that), but frightened." Then, deriding the daily rags in which they exercise their promiscuous misuse of words, he makes the journalists ridiculous with almost a whole page of examples.

That was in 1926, in an age when such matters as the subjunctive and the split infinitive were quotidian and the rule of the philologist was law. The Fowlers (they were two brothers and we should, more correctly, refer to Fowlers' rather than Fowler's Modern English Usage) were a profound influence for the stability of the English language, defending its richness and precision, mocking and correcting verbosities and all other superfluous embellishments, yet indulgent to nimble shifts in structure and meaning, and their book became the bible of those who wished to write or speak with unquestionable clarity. Well beyond my schooldays it was a ready influence; I suspect that today, however, it is at no one's hand in any newspaper and that no one in any department of the BBC has ever heard of it. Now, two full generations after the publication of their great work, the scholarly research of decades, the Fowlers seem to have been prophets crying in a wilderness.