Philip Howard was recently described to me by a leading lexicographer as one of the four working journalists with a dictionary. He cares how he writes, notices how others write and points accurately to the atrocities they commit upon the language, with a sharp eye for new arrivals. The performance is stimulating, informative and lucid. All this is rare indeed in an age when most professional word-persons bring to their task all the reverence and subtlety of those fishermen who obtain their catch by exploding sticks of dynamite under water.

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