The current issue of Language in Society features four articles with a single topic in common – gender and language. For this issue, I realized that by jumping one paper already in hand over a couple of others I could achieve the felicitous result of a relatively unified issue – and now that Language in Society is at five issues a year, the “jumpees” will only have to wait two months for publication in any case. My usual practice is that articles are published in strict order of acceptance – very occasionally, an author will take so long to get the very last revision – the i-dotting and t-crossing and reference-checking – done that the article will lag in publication. Extremely long articles sometimes get delayed an issue. And once or twice I have speeded up publication of an article which languished an unfairly long time in the review process.

We have become accustomed to seeing reference works in CD-ROM format, such as the Oxford English dictionary, often alongside equivalent hardcopy publications. By contrast, Taitaduhaan (‘Our language’) is not a reference work, and it is published not merely in that familiar electronic format but rather as an interactive CD-ROM, in which the user can move with a finger-click from written text, to video images, to audio recordings. Is this a “book,” or an entirely new form of publishing? In any case, “reading” it is definitely a new experience for us in these first years of the 21st century.