‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them.
In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to die in 1918) completed the Concise, they did put in fart, cautioning that it was ‘indecent’. My husband’s enquiry, though, had more point than he knew, for the Fowlers’ first joint enterprise, on moving to adjacent cottages in Guernsey in 1903, was a translation of Lucian. As R.W. Burchfield noted (in his biographical sketch of Henry Fowler, whose Modern English Usage he so judiciously revised), in their translation, ‘in keeping with the spirit of the age, all passages of doubtful decency have been removed’.
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