Drawing on data from the Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database (Straaijer 2014), this chapter sets the context for the other chapters of the collection by exploring the usage guide as a genre since the earliest publication in 1770. While modern usage guides overlap in form and content with other genres of works about language, there are distinct characteristics that identify them as a separate genre. After this genre had slowly been evolving for 150 years, H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) became a model for future publications. However, the usage guide remains a strongly author-driven genre, resulting in much variation in form and content. After continued development and professionalization from the mid-twentieth century onwards, two subtypes within the genre seem to have emerged: one striving for comprehensiveness and the other offering entertaining narrative. This variety may account for the enduring popularity of the genre.

In English Today 30.1, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade introduced the Leiden University research project, ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’, and gave an example of the kind of questions we ask ourselves. That example, about questions relating to the use of have went, was very specific. In this feature, we have some questions that are rather more general, and which have to do with the discourse on usage and normativism.

The articles in this special issue investigate norms and prescriptions about norms and prescriptions in various languages and cultures. They started as papers for a workshop called 'Attitudes to Prescriptivism', held in 2013 at Leiden University. The aim of the workshop was to discuss attitudes towards prescriptivism, primarily from the point of view of those at whom such actions are directed. The articles in this special issue show a variety of attitudes to prescriptivism and the setting of norms, and towards the norms themselves.ARTICLE HISTORY

It is a generally accepted fact that the use of long-s, or <ſ>, was discontinued in English printing at the close of the eighteenth century and that by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century this allograph had all but disappeared. This demise of <ſ> in printing has been fairly well documented, but there is virtually no literature on what happened to it in handwritten documents. The disappearance of <ſ> and <ſs> (as in ʃeems and buʃineʃs) in favour of and is generally ascribed to the printers' wishes to simplify their type-settings. But at what point and to what extent did this simplifying process influence private writing of the period? In this article we have documented the rules, as observed by printers, for the use of long-s in the Late Modern English period, and we illustrate how printing practice during this period compared to the usage of this particular grapheme in letters written by two well-known codifiers of the English language, the grammarians

Is English usage changing more rapidly than it was before? Judging by the decreasing time between editions of ‘Fowlers’ it would seem so: thirty-nine years between Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, from here on MEU1) and Gower's second edition (1965, from here on MEU2), and thirty-one years between the latter and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996, from here on NFMEU). This led Manfred Görlach to write in his review of NFMEU that ‘[t]imes change, and we (and usage) change with them. A new edition of Fowler's classic book is thus in order every thirty to forty years’ (Görlach, 1997).