In this issue, DALE ROBERTS considers a range of recent, especially American, usages

I may not be alone among readers of ET in finding Katie Wales' article ‘Royalese: the rise and fall of “The Queen's English’” (July 1994) frequently muddled, misleading, and inaccurate.

Some emerging features of speech that distinguish usage in New Zealand from the rest of the Anglophone world

ON DECEMBER 2, 1993, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe published an article entitled “The Thought Police Strike Again.” In a parody of novelist Raymond Chandler's immortal Los Angeles detective, Philip Marlowe, Nyhan wrote:

“I was in my office, on the fringe of the ghetto, feeling gypped because a check had bounced, watching the crazy divorcée in the next office, a real babe who used to be a nifty co-ed before she married her hillbilly. He was a piece of white trash whose holy roller ancestors fought the Indians.

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and meanings that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.

A reprint of the Introduction to the new ‘Collins Gem Scots Dictionary’, edited by Marian Makins (1995), which describes Scots as ‘the language of Germanic origin spoken by most Scots’. Tom Shearer is the lexicographer who wrote the piece.

I must apologise to David Jowitt for having so clearly upset him by an article that was so clearly meant to be light-hearted. It was also oriented towards the stereotypical portrayals of the language of royalty, and the ways myth and reality frequently coincide. If I did not make the distinction clear enough, I apologise; but in places I did not really intend a distinction. Moreover, it was the editor himself, Tom McArthur, who suggested I extend the term ‘royalese’ to the (alleged) features of royal speech (and also the speech of the aristocracy), instead of restricting it just to the literary or satirical representations. I decided this would indeed be an apt way of suggesting the blur between fact and fiction, between dialect and stage-dialect, as it were : hence my inevitable use of the phrase ‘literary royalese’, which still seems perfectly clear to me, despite David Jowitt's stricture.

An examination of how places get their names, drawing its examples from the 18th-century voyages of Captain Cook in and around New Zealand

An analysis of the cultural differences in rhetorical styles across the many varieties of English worldwide, particularly as expressed through writing

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and senses that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and senses that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.

A discussion of loan translations, metaphors and other usages that have arisen in the English of Hong Kong in recent years

In this issue, DALE ROBERTS considers a range of recent, especially American, usages.

GEORGE TOWNER of Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, California, describes how he has created a hacker's guide to all the anagrams a crossword-puzzler could ever want.

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and senses that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.

ANDREW HORTON looks at the acronym both in English in general and how it has been used in the air and in space

A survey of the past, present and future of pidgin and creole Englishes, how they have been studied, and how attitudes towards them have changed

New insights on spoken English from the British National Corpus

The third part of an investigation into similar usages at work in the standard English of West Africa and India (first part, ET38, Apr 94; second part, ET40, Oct 94)