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Henry W. Fowler concentrated on British usage, and set the standard for all usage books to follow. Fowler's first edition of 1926 remained in print for many years, but more recent editions have updated the book. Fowler's remark on the Split Infinitive is well-known: : "The English-speaking world may be divided into those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is, those who don't know, but care very much, those who know and approve, those who know and condemn, and those who know and distinguish." Fowler concludes that split infinitives should not attract as much attention as they do, and says that they are indeed sometimes the best way to express one's meaning. See the Split Infinitive article for further discussion. Only the first edition of the book was completely Fowler's. The second edition was a very light revision by Sir Ernest Gowers and the third edition was very substantially revised and rewritten by Robert Burchfield . The third edition is regarded by many as inappropriately liberal in its advice, in part because while it marks a number of constructions and phrases as "informal" it refuses to counsel against their usage in a fashion similar to earlier editions. The difference between the first and second editions, on the one hand, and the third on the other, can be understood as a shift from Prescriptive To Descriptive Linguistics ; the criticism the third edition received is perhaps in part due to the popularity of earlier editions with proponents of prescriptive linguistics such as David Foster Wallace , who wrote approvingly of "Fowler's" in an essay in '' Harper's Magazine ''.
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