A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).

The difference over twenty years, in the making of ET since 1985, includes the vanishing away of paper files. In a cabinet beside my desk I have A–Z files for the many people who literally ‘wrote’ – that is, typed – to me on paper. I almost never consult any of those files now, and don’t remember when I last added a sheet to them. Instead, of course, I check my email, which piles up electronically in non-real space somewhere inside this machine in front of me. And, though I strive to keep my records straight, I seldom check back very far or go into e-files of old e-mails. And, most days, whether in Cambridge or in Hong Kong, I read daily e-abstracts from my much-prized Edinburgh newspaper, The Scotsman, and don't recall when I last saw, leave alone bought and read, a conventional paper edition of it.

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

How rapidly our vocabulary can change, and how yesterday's expressions can vanish without trace. Even words which were used by people the age of the author's children just a few years ago have vanished without trace: untold had a brief flourishing in Wellington as a term of approval, but has vanished completely; grouse, a rather older term, still survives but again not among the young. If old words go, new words come. In a recent survey of the language of primary school children in New Zealand, a word was discovered that all the children knew and virtually none of the teachers knew. To understand the expression, one has to understand something about the games played by children in English-speaking countries.

A study in accentual compromise.

There is something in the very name Estuary English which fills certain sectors of British society with horror and fear, as if we were in the presence of a contagious and potentially devastating disease. It can provoke what John Maidment (1994:7) termed the ‘Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells Syndrome’ (DTWS):

“Nothing is likely to enrage DTW more than the suggestion that the standard language which he/she holds so dear, the grail of which he/she sees him/herself the guardian, is usurped by the usage of people who are NOT OUR CLASS. DTW is not going down without a fight, you may be sure.”

This Times-reading, Radio 4-listening guardian of the English language, armed with pen and paper, is ready to pick up on mispronunciations, misspellings, and misusages of grammar and send in a letter of complaint, bemoaning the decline of the language.

Changing trends in colloquial American English from the viewpoint of a visitor and their implications for teaching of English in China. Knowing that language changes and an appreciation of current changes is of great importance for foreign-language learners as it helps enable them to have a good command of the current language so as to strengthen their ability to communicate with native speakers with facility. The reality Chinese learners of English face is, however, that they hardly have opportunities to be exposed to natural spoken forms of the target language around them, let alone access to its current changing trends. This paper aims to present such information. Based on the investigation I made among native English-speaking Americans, it tries, from a descriptive pragmatic point of view, to give an account of some salient trends of American English in daily communication. It takes everyday spoken American English as the object of study, for it is the kernel part of the language for social interaction. It is this part of the language that first undergoes changes in response to various social events, and that, having much to do with the study of language use, deserves our special attention.

Starts with excerpt from Geoffrey Hughes, Words of War (ET17, 1989). The lexicon of war in the twenty-first century. The major development since this article was published (1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down) was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, now styled ‘9/11’. This used a stupefyingly original strategy of attacking the heart of America's capitalist and military establishment with the unconventional weapons of civilian aircraft and kamikazi pilots. Indeed, the bombing was a more ruthless variation of Pearl Harbour, being a hijack, less damaging in terms of hardware, but far more devastating in its effect on national morale and its propaganda impact. On a smaller scale, suicide bombings have now become relatively common.

In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English. These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.