“THIS IS THE CBC,” says the announcer. Till quite recently, stressing the “is” would have implied that someone had been asserting that it WASN'T the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but not now. Similarly, we are told that the Olympic games ARE taking place, tomorrow WILL be sunny, and the host of the program HAS convened the usual panel.

This article provides an illustrated account of the extent to which elements of the English language have become commonplace in Greek, particularly in magazine and other texts, and particularly where Greek has long had a powerful influence on English and other Western European languages, especially in adding to their academic, medical, and technological lexicon. English now appears to be paying Greek back in kind and in full – across a wide range of registers. The illustrative material that accompanies the article helps demonstrate the extent to which present-day Greek has absorbed lexical material from English.

IN MAY 2003 there was a notice on the World Wide Web announcing the “32st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest”. The announcement began: The 32st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest will be hosted by the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) …Not long before that I had noticed an advertisement for the “33nd Annual New Jersey Irish Festival”, also on the Web. Such unexpected forms of the ordinal numerals naturally arouse one's curiosity.

The renowned American linguist and lexicographer Allen Walker Read, who was born on June 2, 1906, died in October 2002. A universally respected academic lexicographer, he was impressive in his display of knowledge and his readiness to build bridges between the United Kingdom and the United States.

On and around the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, the world's press made full use of ‘9/11’ (also the national emergency telephone number in the US). The symbolism of number/divider/number has not replaced either ‘September 11’ or ‘Sept. 11’, but added to them by giving the date a special resonance. It may yet become the key name for the whole horrific series of events.

‘Who are these Fowlers?’ wrote a reviewer in the New York Times, quoted on page 56 of this much-needed biography of the more famous of the brothers, Henry Watson Fowler. The review was not of Modern English Usage or any of their other well-known books, but of an earlier work they wrote for Oxford University Press, a translation of the Syrian Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, published in 1905, the work that first brought them into contact with the strange world of academic publishing.