In 1903, he took up a spartan existence with his younger brother, Frank, on the island of Guernsey. Working out of a pair of granite cottages, the Fowler brothers collaborated on a book of usage, which they called “The King’s English.” Despite their amateur status — “We were plunging into the sea of lexicography without having been first taught to swim,” Fowler later wrote — the book was a success. The brothers went on to edit The Concise Oxford Dictionary and were planning a more ambitious book on usage when World War I broke out. Although Henry was 57 at the time, he lied about his age and doggedly petitioned to be sent to the battle front, where he promptly fell ill and had to be sent home. His brother fared worse, dying of tuberculosis at the end of the war. It was left to Henry to complete the work that would make their surname a household word in Britain. “I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied,” he wrote in dedicating it to his brother’s memory. (Nicely put, that!)

The book was published in 1926, to immediate acclaim and brisk sales. Although language, as the truism goes, is an ever changing Heraclitean river, Fowler was not revised until 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers gave it a light going-over, preserving both the spirit and the substance of the original. (The same cannot be said of the 1996 third edition, heavily reworked by R. W. Burchfield.) Now Oxford University Press has reissued the classic first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ($29.95), with an acute new introduction by the linguist David Crystal. It is a volume that everyone who aspires to a better command of English should possess and consult — sparingly.

Fowler was fastidious in both manners and morals, but he was no prig. He had a mordant wit and a keen sense of irony, which is part of what makes “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” such a pleasure to dip into. Despite the title, it’s not really a dictionary. True, there are many entries on spelling and pronunciation (we are informed that the past tense of shampoo can be either “-poo’d” or “-pooed,” for example, and warned against the pronunciation of “enema,” then “in very general use,” as “in-EE-ma”). There are brief and masterly elucidations of fine distinctions in meaning, such as that between “cheerful” and “cheery” (“The cheerful feels & perhaps shows contentment, the cheery shows & probably feels it”).

The bulk of the book, however, consists of little essays. Some of them are heavy going. I have never been able to get through the eight columns of wisdom about the subjunctive, let alone the eleven columns on the troublesome hyphen; nor have I found the impenetrable entry on “nor” much help.

Most entries, though, are as light and whimsical as their (often mysterious) headings, like “Swapping Horses” or “Out of the Frying-Pan.” Under “Frying Pan” we are told, “The writer who produces an ungrammatical, an ugly, or even a noticeably awkward phrase, & lets us see that he has done it in trying to get rid of something else that he was afraid of, gives a worse impression of himself than if he had risked our catching him in his original misdemeanour; he is out of the frying-pan into the fire.” This is followed by the usual surfeit of examples drawn from the contemporary press — e.g., “The reception was held at the bride’s aunt.” (Here the unfortunate writer was evidently trying to avoid “bride’s aunt’s,” but the phrase “at the house of” eluded him.) Fowler reveled in such cock-ups, hoping “to nauseate” the reader “by accumulation of instances, as sweet-shop assistants are cured of larceny by cloying.”