THE general, and probably irreversible, decline in writing and sub editing standards means that every day of the week, on any page of any newspaper, you will find a whole range of solecisms that would not have been tolerated even 20 years ago. Now such howlers are not even noticed, except by a few readers to whom language and its usage still matter, but who feel too defeated to protest any more.

These readers are not pedantic purists but simply people who have always believed that the way in which something is said is not just as important as what is said but is actually inseparable from it. They are angry and bewildered at what has happened because they recognise what George Orwell recognised - that our use of language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish", and that "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts".

Orwell made that observation 51 years ago, when the general condition of written English was far healthier than it is now, and when Henry Fowler's Modern English Usage (first published in 1926 as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage) was considered an indispensable reference book by large numbers of people who cared about the way they wrote. (Indeed, it should be stressed that Fowler's most devoted admirers were not lexicographers or grammarians, but those people approvingly termed "the common reader" by Samuel Johnson.)

Nowadays, Fowler tends to be depicted as both fusty and fussy - but fussiness about language is surely a virtue, while the charge of fustiness ignores the playful common sense that is everywhere in his book. Here he is, for instance, on the vexed question of the split infinitive and on "those who do not know but care very much" about it: "These people betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinion of others."

Fowler, in fact, sensibly felt that to split an infinitive need not be a horrendous crime, especially when greater clarity is the result - a feeling shared by Bill Bryson in his witty and wise Mother Tongue, and, I'm happy to see, by Robert Burchfield in the book under review.

The title of this volume is curious. Offering itself as the "third edition" of Fowler's original (the second was by Ernest Gowers), it is no such thing, being a radical reinterpretation that pays lip service to Fowler but borrows very little from him.

The book is a notable achievement, and (it would be nice to think, anyway) an important one, too though readers who begin with the preface won't be encouraged. While purporting to celebrate Fowler's private scholarship, Dr Burchfield attempts to disparage both his "schoolmasterly" eccentricity and the kinds of people who now adhere to it - a judge, a colonel and a retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities were the three most recent Fowler fans he found, leaving one to wonder what circles he moves in.

At the same time he rather childishly boasts about the database he built up in order to make this new book possible, bizarrely telling us that "in computer terminology, it contains no garbage". Happily (see the entry on sentence adverbs"), the body of the book contains no garbage, either.

In general, Dr Burchfield's approach to usage may be too liberal to meet the approval of his judge, colonel and retired curator, yet while there are some occasions on which he might daringly (see "split infinitive") have taken more of a stand, he is generally a sensible, informative and even genial guide, and his examples from contemporary sources are often more pointed than those Fowler gave.

And more depressing, too English usage really is going to the dogs. All of us, of course, commit grammatical errors, but some of us have the good grace to feel ashamed when we do. Such shame, alas, is rare. Indeed, when one points out to students of English the dangling participles (see "unattached participles") that litter the pages of even the most prestigious newspapers every day of the week, their reaction is to shrug and say: well, if it's all right for the professionals, why isn't it all right for me? That's not an easy one to answer.