“It is a gross canard,” says Bryan Garner, “that beginning a sentence with ‘but’ is stylistically slipshod. In fact, doing so is highly desirable in any number of contexts …”

Who, you may ask, is Bryan Garner? At 44, he is the wunderkind of American dictionary-making, the author and sole proprietor of “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” just published in its second edition by Oxford University Press. At $39.95, it’s a bargain. The work runs to 924 pages, with 9,000 entries supported by 7,200 examples of usage. Following in the tradition of the immortal Henry W. Fowler, Garner is both descriptive and prescriptive. He is a man of strong opinions and wide-ranging scholarship.

At least a few of those opinions are remarkably cockeyed. The entry on “But. Beginning Sentences with” provides an example. Some students of style do indeed wave a caution flag at beginning a sentence with “but,” but their objection is not that the usage is “slipshod.” The objection is that the pre-emptive “but” is frequently redundant. Instead of sharpening a point, the device often dulls it. Try this sequence on your writer’s ear, from an editorial in The New York Times on Sept. 11:

“Even as the twin towers were falling, we wondered what kind of world we would find ourselves living in in the future. The trauma of that day led us to expect an abrupt demarcation in our lives and in the life of the nation … But coming into this second anniversary, our response is more measured.”

In my own view, that beginning “but” adds nothing but clutter to the paragraph. The writer didn’t need it. For the record, I should add that I do not object to all “but” beginnings. On this same day in September, the Times’ platoon of editorial writers began seven other sentences with “but.” Five of the seven were good buts, two were not.

That last sentence – the sentence beginning “Five of the seven” – featured a comma splice, i.e., a sentence in which two independent clauses are joined only by a comma instead of by a conjunction. Garner says correctly that the splice is “usually but not always unacceptable.” He would prefer a dash or a semicolon instead of a comma. Fiddlesticks! On this issue, I’m a comma man.

Garner begins his dictionary with an entry on the indefinite articles “a” and “an.” He condemns the use of “an” in “an hypothesis” and “an hereditary title.” Such “ans,” he says, are “affectations in need of editing.” He would change them to read “a hypothesis” and “a hereditary title.” Pooh! We read not only with our eyes but also with our ears. Read the combinations aloud. “An hypothesis” has a lilt and a swing to it; “a hypothesis” trips on its feet. When the accent in the “h” word is on the second syllable, “an” will always read better than “a” – thus, “an hysterical spectator,” “an habitual offender.” (The editors of the AP Stylebook disagree, but what do they know?)

Having picked a few bones with Garner – picky, picky, picky! – I’m happy to praise this new edition as a whole. There is a huge volume of helpful material here, e.g., a sensible discussion of such words as data, decimate, enormity, fulsome and transpire. They have lost their virginity. He is sorry about that, but he cannot blubber about it. Over the past 60 years, he remarks, “data” has come to be treated increasingly as a mass noun taking a singular verb. In the old days, “datum” was the singular and “data” the plural. Today, in nonscientific contexts, “‘datum’ is likely to sound pretentious.”

He will not yield on “enormity.” Properly employed, the noun implies great wickedness or monstrous evil. If a writer’s purpose is to describe great size, such alternatives as “magnitude” or “hugeness” are available.

In highly recommending Garner’s book from Oxford, I take nothing away from Merriam-Webster’s excellent Dictionary of English Usage. I have lived with the Webster’s every workday for 13 years, but I’m finding Garner a delightful alternative. He is moving into an idiosyncratic fraternity with H.W. Fowler, Wilson Follett, Jacques Barzun, Theodore Bernstein and others. Welcome to the club!

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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