now another shade of meaning had been found for it—that of “a leading player in some game or sport.” A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of The Complete Lawn Tennis Player, is produced in evidence. But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular Modern English Usage, which was first published in 1926, insisted—contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the OED—that protagonist is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.
