‘To be avoided by every correct Writer’: George Harris’s Observations upon the English Language and the first English usage guide

Abstract

ABSTRACT Robert Baker is generally acknowledged to have written the first English usage guide in 1770, but in 1752, George Harris published a short pamphlet called Observations upon the English Language in a Letter to Friend that shares many features of a usage guide. Though smaller than Baker’s book, Harris’s pamphlet nonetheless collects some 66–126 usage items (depending on how one counts categories and instances) and pronounces his preference for one of the variants within each item. Harris’s Observations upon the English Language starts out mainly as a proposal for respelling several words in English, but ends up also prescribing variants for pronunciation, grammar, word meaning, and phrasing. Harris seems to have taken his impetus from an earlier pamphlet published in 1724 (The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation) that calls for just such codifying of usage issues. In many ways Harris’s Observations upon the English Language looks at least like a precursor to the English usage guide and may be a usage guide itself.