THIS ARTICLE springs from my experiences when I submitted a piece to English Today that contained characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I had used a font containing such characters that came with my word-processing program, and I submitted the article electronically as a file attachment. Unfortunately, the characters did not arrive in the same form as they had left, owing to incompatibility between the two computer systems, and so there were parts of the article that did not make much sense. The editor graciously reprinted it in its correct form in the following issue (ET80).