Cover not available
Part of
Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English
Edited by Marina Dossena
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 55–71

Five Hundred Mistakes Corrected

An early American English usage guide

| Leiden University, The Netherlands
The anonymous Five hundred mistakes corrected (1856) is one of the very earliest American English usage guides. In its approach, contents and use of proscriptive metalanguage it fits into the tradition of usage guide writing, which had started in England nearly a century before and which continues, with ever increasing numbers of publications, down to the present day. But whereas in England the earliest usage guides served an important function to people who became socially mobile after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, in America the rise and popularity of the genre is closely linked to increasing numbers of immigrants from Europe around the middle of the nineteenth century.
Published online: 12 February 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.4.03tie
References (37)
Primary sources
Anon. 1856. Five hundred mistakes of daily occurrence in speaking, pronouncing, and writing the English language, corrected. New York: Daniel Burgess & Co.; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.; Cincinnati: Applegate & Co.Google Scholar
. 1856?. Live and learn: A guide for all, who wish to speak and write correctly. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, Publishers.Google Scholar
Baker, Robert. 1770. Reflections on the English language. London: J. Bell.Google Scholar
Fowler, H.W. 1926. A dictionary of modern English usage. Oxford: University Press.Google Scholar
Hurd, Seth T. 1847. A grammatical corrector. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co.Google Scholar
Lowth, Robert. 1762. A short introduction to English grammar. London: A. Millar and R. & J. Dodsley.Google Scholar
Murray, Lindley. 1795. English grammar. York: Wilson, Spence and Mawman.Google Scholar
Secondary sources
American national biography online: [URL].
Bailey, Richard W. 1996. Nineteenth-century English. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in modern times 1700–1945. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Brook, G.L. 1970. The language of Dickens. London: André Deutsch.Google Scholar
Burchfield, R.W. 1991. The Fowler brothers and the tradition of usage handbooks. In Gerhard Leitner (ed.), English traditional grammars: An international perspective, 93–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burt, Angela. 2002. An A to Z of correct English. Oxford: How to Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Buschmann-Göbels, Astrid. 2008. Bellum grammaticale (1712) – A battle of books and a battle for the market? In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing in eighteenth-century England, 81–100. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Busse, Ulrich & Anne Schröder. 2006. From prescriptivism to descriptivism? 140 years of English usage guides: Some old and new controversies. In Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe & Anja Müller (eds.), Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg. Proceedings, 457–473. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.Google Scholar
. 2008. How Fowler became “The Fowler”: An anatomy of a success story. Paper presented at the workshop Normative Linguistics, ISLE-1, Freiburg, October 2008.
. 2009. Fowler’s Modern English Usage at the interface of lexis and grammar. In Ute Römer & Rainer Schulze (eds.), Exploring the lexis-grammar interface, 69–87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Problem areas of English grammar between usage, norm and variation. In Alexandra Lenz & Albrecht Plewnia (eds.), Grammar between norm and variation, 87–102. Peter Lang GmbH. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2004. A sound atlas of Irish English. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2013. The sociolinguistics of new dialect formation. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Late Modern English (Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English). Bergamo (Italy), 28–30 August 2013.
HUGE: Hyper usage guide of English. [URL].
Matthews, William. 1938. Cockney past and present. Short history of the dialect of London [repr. 1972]. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Mazo, Jeffrey. 2011. The know-nothings. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 53(6). 238–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mittins, W.H., Mary Salu, Mary Edminson & Sheila Coyne. 1970. Attitudes to English usage [repr. 1975]. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Navest, Karlijn. 2008. ‘Borrowing a few passages’: Lady Ellenor Fenn and her use of sources. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing in eighteenth-century England, 223–243. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
ODNB: The Oxford dictionary of national biography, Online edition, [URL].
Peters, Pam. 2006. English usage: Prescription and description. In Bas Aarts & April McMahon (eds.), The handbook of English linguistics, 759–780. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sundby, Bertil, Anne Kari Bjørge & Kari E. Haugland. 1991. A dictionary of English normative grammar 1700–1800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 1996. Introduction. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Two hundred years of Lindley Murray, 9–25. Münster: Nodus.Google Scholar
. 2008. Henry Fowler and his eighteenth-century predecessors. Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the history of linguistic ideas 51. 5–24.Google Scholar
. 2011. The bishop’s grammar. Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 2012. Codifying the English language. In Anne Schröder, Ulrich Busse & Ralf Schneider (eds.), Codification, canons, and curricula. Description and prescription in language and literature, 61–77. Bielefeld: Aisthesis.Google Scholar
. 2013. Studying attitudes to English usage – Investigating prescriptivism in a large research project. English Today 29(3). 3–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vorlat, Emma. 2001. Lexical rules in Robert Baker’s “Reflections on the English Language”. Leuvense Bijdragen 90(4). 391–401.Google Scholar
Weiner, Edmund. 1983. The Oxford guide to English usage. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
. 1988. On editing a usage guide. In E.G. Stanley & T.F. Hoad (eds.), Words for Robert Burchfield’s sixty-fifth birthday, 171–183. Cambridge: Brewer.Google Scholar
WordSmith Tools: [URL].
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Dossena, Marina
2022. “Gems of elocution and humour”. In Earlier North American Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G66], ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.