If your pet peeves include people who speak the language with little regard for or knowledge of correctness, you might be interested in a Jan. 10 Quillette article by Bruce Gilley on “Guarding the Gates of Our Language; One hundred years after the publication of Fowler’s ‘Dictionary of Modern English Usage,’ it is more important than ever to uphold standards of correct English.”
Of course, “America’s Man of Letters,” as William Pritchard dubbed him, was cited. John Updike, the master stylist and a precise practitioner of the language, was apparently involved in a kerfuffle involving his beloved New Yorker:
“Most surprising, perhaps, is the enduring allegiance to Fowler at The New Yorker, citadel of oppressed writers, and writers on oppression, in modern American letters. In a curtain-raiser in September 2025 for the Fowler centenary, the University of Delaware academic Ben Yagoda traced the inextricable links between the magazine, launched in 1925, and Fowler, almost as if the magazine was founded as a sort of Society for the Propagation of the Fowler in the United States. In one telling anecdote culled from the magazine’s archives, Yagoda found that the young John Updike, while studying at Oxford in 1954, had submitted a poem to the magazine that was caught up in a minor storm of editorial debate on punctuation according to Fowler. Updike bowed before the strictures, and his corrected poem was published later that year. Thereafter, he seems to have become Keeper of the Fowler at The New Yorker. His scathing review of Burchfield’s 1996 desecration is a monument to fine English sensibilities in the New World. ‘It has the charm, in this age of cultural diversity and politically correct sensitivity, of assuring all users of English that no intelligible usage is absolutely wrong,’ Updike writes. ‘But it proposes no ideal of clarity in language or, beyond that, of grace, which might serve as an instrument of discrimination.’ That word again.
“As Updike foresaw, the globalisation of English and the radicalisation of the academy mean that the need for Fowler has become greater not less. ‘The language is a mess, except as scoured and rinsed and hung out to dry by Fowler.’”
The remaining letters are directed to various editors, his parents (whom he addresses as “Plowvillians”), and others that collectively give some sense of his relationship with The New Yorker. The final letter, addressed to fiction editor Deborah Treisman, is a poignant one, given that it was written just 17 days before Updike passed away:
Heer had written, “Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the 
“At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really, was ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.
The issue was negative versus positive reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New York Times review was cited as an example of the former, with Lehmann-Haupt arguing that “by repeatedly invoking Catch-22 Mr. O’Brien reminds us that Mr. Heller caught the madness of war better, if only because the logic of Catch-22 is consistently surrealistic and doesn’t try to mix in fantasies that depend on their believability to sustain. I can even imagine it being said that 
“American novelist John Updike claimed not to write for ego: ‘I think of it more as innocence. A writer must be in some way innocent.’ We might raise an eyebrow at this, from the highly successful and famously intrusive chronicler of human closeness. Even David Foster Wallace, the totem effigy of literary chauvinism, denounced Updike as a ‘phallocrat.’ But if we doubt such innocence of Updike, pronouncing as he was at the flushest height of fiction’s postwar heyday, we might believe it of these new novelists, writing as they are and when they are. Without a promise of glory, and facing general skepticism, they have written from pure motives. They are novelists as Updike defined them: ‘only a reader who was so excited that he tried to imitate and give back the bliss that he enjoyed’.
As part of a grand centennial year celebration, an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour featured