Robert Hartwell Fiske (March 5, 1948 – April 25, 2016) was a writer, editor, and publisher of The Vocabula Review, an online journal about the English language, from 1999 until his death in 2016.
[1] After Fiske's death of melanoma in 2016 at the age of 68, essayist Joseph Epstein said that Fiske was "an unknown soldier in that most glorious and hopeless of wars, that against the ignorant and abusive use of language."
[2] Reviewing Vocabula Bound, a collection of essays and poems culled from The Vocabula Review, linguist Alan Kaye said it is "far too prescriptivist in orientation for a sophisticated linguistic audience".
[3] In the Canadian newspaper the National Post, a book reviewer said Fiske's Dictionary of Unendurable English would be enjoyed by "word snobs and copy editors" and would benefit those learning English.
[4] A book reviewer in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail said that it is "so passionate in the prescriptivist cause of smiting the lax and the uncaring that the book at times resembles a parody of itself".