A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage

Note: Also called the Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage and the Garner’s Modern English Usage, depending on the editions.

Seeral editions. New York: Oxford University Press. Author: Bryan A. Garner. The third edition: 2011. Pp. xxx + 991. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-538420-8. For the 4th edition: Garner’s Modern English Usage, 4th ed., by Bryan A. Garner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. lvi + 1,056. $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-049148-2.

Fourth Edition Review

Reviewed by Edward Finegan ( Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
Volume 38, Issue 2, 2017):

“Prescriptivism is as American as apple pie or the NRA, and as inevitable as sex, death, and taxes,” John Algeo (2000, 246)has written. Unlike perennial popular interest in the subject, scholarly interest has waxed and waned, although a recent upswing can be noted in a series of Prescriptivism Conferences, initiated in Sheffield in 2003; the sixth has been announced for Vigo, Spain, in 2020. Values of competing kinds have been at the heart of prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism for centuries, and the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, Utah, identified “Value(s) and Language Prescriptivism” as its theme. Another thread among the 2017 participants was the putative distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism: Is it a dichotomy or a continuum? In the discussion, I don’t recall anyone mentioning that Bryan Garner characterizes himself as “a kind of descriptive prescriber” (xxxvi) in the fourth installment of his series of usage dictionaries, titled Garner’s Modern English Usage( GMEU), “English Usage” now replacing the “American Usage” of earlier editions.

GMEUis unwieldy, weighing five pounds and registering over 1,100 pages. 2 A couple of things differentiating it from the third edition ( Garner 2009) highlight a more up-to-date approach. In the 2009 dust-jacket photo, Garner wears a dark suit with a shirt and tie, the shirt appearing to exhibit French cuffs, but in 2016 the shirt collar is unbuttoned, the tie is tossed, and Garner sports a light-colored jacket: iconically, an eye-catching reorientation to English usage. The hallmark of GMEU’s substantive jazziness is its reliance on Google ngrams to uncover frequency ratios of variant usages. First described by Michel et al. (2010), Google ngrams can trace the frequency of occurrence of any word (and some expressions) over the course of centuries as represented in millions of books digitized in the Google Books project. Multiple [End Page 120]expressions can be compared in the same ngram view (a useful feature relevant later in this review), and exploring ngrams is informative and often surprising. Reliance on corpora isn’t new for Garner, but reporting quantitative findings from the Google Books corpus is.

The fourth edition’s fifty-six pages of front matter include the first edition’s lengthy preface, lists of essay entries and abbreviations, and a pronunciation guide (repeated on the inside back cover). New to the third edition and continued in the fourth are a key to Garner’s language-change index and two long essays: “Making Peace in the Language Wars” and “The Ongoing Tumult in English Usage.” 4 While the two essays display less peace and more tumult than the title of the first essay suggests, GMEUoffers a limited course correction to Garner’s generally prescriptivist route and a possible opening to a modest accord among prescriptivists and descriptivists, something Garner has both encouraged and frustrated in earlier writing. Now GMEUdraws in part on the 25 million digitized volumes searchable via Google’s Ngram Viewer (//books.google.com/ngrams), a body of texts about which interested parties can talk with reliability.

GMEU’s back matter contains a glossary of grammatical, rhetorical, and other language-related terms in fifty-two tri-columned pages; a timeline of books on usage in eleven tri-columned pages; a select bibliography; and a select index of approximately 350 of the writers quoted or mentioned in the book. At the heart of GMEUare 983 pages of alphabetized entries in a section called “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” mirroring the title of the book. The name is apt in that the English usage described is, in the end, filtered through Garner’s eyes and ears and represents his view of what’s enshrined in Google Books and elsewhere. He conceded in the third edition that he “relied—unabashedly—on [his] own sense, based on a lifetime of serious linguistic study, of where a given usage falls on the spectrum of acceptability in standard english”.

Third Edition Review

Third Edition Reviewed by James E. Clapp, in Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
Number 33, 2012. The following is an excerpt:

“With the publication of A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage in 1987, when he was still in his twenties, Bryan Garner instantly established himself as a thoughtful, confident, and outspoken authority on legal language and usage. With this third edition, renamed Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage and easily twice the size of the original (considering not only the page count but also the larger page size and smaller print), Garner caps a phenomenally productive quarter century of work that has made him the first name in contemporary American legal lexicography and placed him in the first rank of writers on English usage generally. That work has included, among many other publications and accomplishments, writing the book that is now called Garner’s Modern American Usage (published in three increasingly voluminous editions from 1998 to 2009) and orchestrating the total revamping of Black’s Law Dictionary, of which Garner was made editor in chief in 1995 and which he transformed, over the course of three editions (the seventh, eighth, and ninth, published from 1999 to 2009), from a hoary tome dutifully purchased by generations of law students, but then almost never consulted, into a modern resource for lawyers and lexicographers alike. Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, Third Edition (to which all page number citations below refer unless otherwise identified) can thus be viewed as the culmination of a trilogy—indeed, a trilogy of trilogies—of interrelated works.1

This book—which I will refer to as GDLU3—contains thousands upon thousands of entries discussing, by my calculation, upwards of ten thousand words, phrases, and variant forms that are either specific to or commonly found in legal writing, from a and an to zygnomic and mesonomic (terms coined in a 1927 book on legal philosophy and seldom, if ever, used since). These are interspersed with hundreds of essays on topics from “Absolute Constructions” to “Zeugma and Syllepsis.” These enlightening essays—like one on “Negatives” that among other things explains how a double negative like not unreasonable can have a crucially [End Page 251] different legal significance from the seemingly synonymous term without the not un- (p. 600)—are conveniently catalogued in the front matter under the headings “Style,” “Grammar and Usage,” “Legal Lexicology and Special Conventions,” “Word Formation, Inflection, Spelling, and Pronunciation,” and “Punctuation and Typography.” The back matter includes a select bibliography helpfully organized into twenty categories such as “Usage Guides,” “Legal Writing Style,” and “Plain English”; an index of periodicals cited; and a much more interesting select index of writers cited. Being cited in the book is not necessarily an honor: Garner scrupulously documents his entries with thousands of real-life examples from legal sources, about equally divided between favored and disfavored wording. Often the negative examples demonstrate only too well the confusion that can result from uninformed or ill-chosen usage.

The primary goal of the book is to help lawyers write more clearly. It is a goal likely to be applauded even by descriptivists inclined to regard usage manuals in general with suspicion. Garner does this partly by explaining the fine points of general English usage, partly by elucidating traditional legal language that often is confusing even to lawyers (for example, expounding upon dependent relative revocation [a phrase from the law of wills having nothing to do with dependent relatives; p. 266] or distinguishing supplemental pleading from amended pleading [a distinction that depends upon whether the added material could have been included in the original pleading; p. 868]), and partly by urging reforms in the direction of simplicity and directness in legal writing.

But by explicating legal language and usage as it exists and suggesting ways to clarify it, this book performs a particular service for nonlawyers, and especially for general lexicographers. Most legal language is just ordinary language used in specialized ways, and one of the functions of this book is to highlight those special uses and differentiate legal meanings from ordinary meanings.”