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Lowth's awareness of grammatical appropriateness to context as determined by style and addressee. It links actual usage in the letters to the norm presented in the grammar, showing the fallacy of the assumption that his rules were based on his own usage, and also that the language of the aristocracy served as his model of correctness.

This chapter explores the complexity of attitudes to the usage problems ain’t, literally, and like in American English, from the point of view of both prescriptivist discourse found in usage guides and speakers’ ideas about these usage problems. I argue that the stakes for speakers involved in using certain usage problems are different in different contexts, and that these usage problems merit more serious sociolinguistic attention. I pay particular attention to how the attitudes of speakers towards the usage problems considered in this chapter differ from those expressed in usage guides. One of the conclusions of this analysis is that different usage problems have different social implications for different speakers. Grammatical usage problems in particular seem to be more closely associated with education, although regional and language context sensitivity play a role as well.

Usage guides are an extremely popular genre, as is evident from new titles being published year after year and established ones being revised and reprinted. They are a marketable product, as both writers and publishers know. The genre did not start with Fowler, despite what many people think; it has a long history going back to the late eighteenth century. Usage advice today is also found online, while it was already the subject of satire in Punch during the nineteenth century. Yet how many usage problems there are is something authors—journalists, writers, but also linguists—show no consensus on. Usage problems come and go, and attitudes to them, expressed both by the general public and by usage guide writers, are found to change over the years. Some works remain remarkably conservative, which appears to be what is desired by readers who often feel insecure about what exactly proper English is.

The famous English novelist Kingsley Amis also wrote a usage guide, called The King’s English, published posthumously in 1997. This title refers to his illustrious predecessor Henry Fowler, who is frequently quoted in the book and even has an entry of his own—unusual for the genre. In this chapter I will argue that Amis’s The King’s English is not a typical usage guide. Though it does offer language advice, most of the entries read like brief linguistic—often humorous—narratives rather than typical usage items. His section on Americanisms, is an example of this; and he also published instances of usage advice elsewhere, as on the once controversial hopefully. This chapter therefore argues that the book was actually a publisher’s project, aiming to profit both from Amis’s reputation when he was still remembered well by the public and from the growing market for usage advice literature at the time.