In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. A few years earlier, Wolcott Gibbs, another editor, had put together an internal document for new members of the staff titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It was a numbered list of thirty-one strictures, and in the penultimate one Gibbs wrote, “Fowler’s English Usage is our reference book. Fowler’s “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” was published the following year, and Ross seized on it enthusiastically. (The book is usually referred to as “Modern English Usage” or simply as “Fowler,” in the eponymous manner of Hoyle or Roget.) In his obituary, which marked the first time his name appeared in the magazine, White wrote, “He came equipped with not much knowledge and only two books—Webster’s Dictionary and Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage.’ These books were his history, his geography, his literature, his art, his music, his everything.”“Modern English Usage” had a long and rather winding path to publication.