An account of how lexical items once confined to one gender have begun to be used for both in American English

An examination of why people regard some words as inherently more beautiful than others

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.

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.

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

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

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)

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

Following on from Virginia Pulcini's article on English in Italy (ET40, Oct 94), an account of English in Switzerland

A rare glimpse into a problem in the world of medical lexicography, focusing on the eponyms diverticulum of Kommerell and Gerbode defect