Fowler

[Steven Maas (CUTR)]

On Mon, 28 Oct 1996 LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU wrote:

> Fowler has a few useful suggestions and a few helpful explications, but his
> book is so riddled with judgments that replace actual observation and has so
> little to support many of his factual speculations that it makes me extremely
> impatient.  There are many times when I was led to wonder if he
> d ever bothered to crack the simplest reference work (like a dictionary, for
> example).
> 
> Steve Weisenburger's A GRAVITY'S RAINBOW COMPANION is so far superior (despite
> some errors and omissions of its own)_that the two cannot even be compared!

I've read only portions of both books.  I found the opinions (which is, I
guess, what you mean by "judgments that replace actual observations")
expressed in Fowler's book easier to skip over than in Weisenburger's. 
This leaves the annotations to help when I didn't know to what TRP
referred.  Am I right in guessing that by "factual speculations (?)" you
mean errors, as in incorrect annotations?  I don't know how many of these
are in Fowler's book.  Maybe Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge
University _isn't_ the primal center of British physical science; maybe
the term croix mystique _isn't_ drawn from palmistry--I don't know.  At
any rate, the book provides me with many seemingly useful--albeit perhaps
_faux_--explanations.