Sometimes the world directly impinges even on language journals. This notably happened to ET69 (18:1, Jan 02), the first issue after terrorists destroyed New York's Twin Towers. In that issue, I looked at some of the usage of this new kind of terrorism and those who have to deal with it, focusing first on the terror (notably at Ground Zero in New York), then on the words of George W. Bush, who was described by one journalist as ‘moving from the quiet language of grief to the rowdy colloquialisms of the Old West’, and finally to Islamic expressions both co-opted by al-Qaeda and used by Western writers.

THE ALLIANCE between US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the recent Second Gulf War has appeared anomalous to many, because they belong to ideologically very different political parties. Blair, in particular, has been accused of having betrayed some of the left-wing ideas that, historically, have characterised the Labour Party. This article seeks to understand the extent to which, at least in linguistic terms, the ideas of Blair and Bush may not be as alike as one might be tempted to believe. Two small corpora of interviews and speeches were collected over a period of some six weeks, all relating to the war in Iraq. Analysis of the corpora reveals some notable differences between Blair and Bush and also shows that certain important – and more hidden – elements of discourse escape this type of investigation and need closer scrutiny.

A seriously tongue-in-cheek essay on helping learners learn through doubting and challenging, and not through swallowing whole what they are told in the classroom or a book.

English has been established in India for well over two centuries, and is now both its major lingua franca and ‘window on the world’. Some Indianisms are however little known beyond South Asia and are liable to be regarded by native speakers of English as ‘deviant’ in various ways. Here, a project is described in which a set of distinctive and representative Indian English expressions was shown to a group of native English speakers who were asked to comment on them. The list includes both distinctive words (such as face-cut, freeship, and weightage) and distinctive senses of universally used words (such as chaste, see, and tempo). The responses are discussed and a summarizing conclusion presented.

It is told, that in the art of education he performed wonders; and a formidable list is given of the authors, Greek and Latin, that were read in Aldersgate-street, by youth between ten and fifteen or sixteen years of age. Those who tell or receive these stories should consider that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the horseman must be limited by the power of his horse. Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others, can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.

Samuel Johnson, “John Milton”

The greatest man of letters in English continually reminds us in his essays and in Boswell's Life that we need to expect an awful lot of resistance to learning, and that he himself, Dr. Samuel Johnson (who had single-handedly composed a dictionary in seven years) lived full of “vagrant inattention” and “sluggish indifference” – though not of “absurd misapprehension”.

NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH is one of the most closely studied national varieties of English outside of the USA and UK, and a source of significance for the dialect differentiation and historical evolution of English. Most of the work has been done in the relatively short period of about 15 years compared with the longer time frame of studies in British and American English. One reason for this is that New Zealand English has, from its beginning, benefited from significant co-operative and collaborative activity among New Zealand linguists.

IN 1989, English Today published an article by Sangsup Lee entitled “The subversion of Korean” (ET20 Oct 89). Dr. Lee was concerned with the importation from English into written Korean of hitherto unmarked grammatical distinctions like singular/plural, past/past perfect and active/passive. More recently, Korean scholars and commentators have become concerned over what they see as a different kind of subversion, this time lexical rather than grammatical, with the widespread adoption of English words into the Korean language.

In the paper to which this study responds, Bruthiaux discussed verbal creativity in IT, ranging from short figurative terms such as bug and virus to such ‘heavy premodifying groups’ as random access memory and central processing memory. He also drew attention to both intransitive verb forms such as Setup is initializing and The menu will repeat, and (most notably) such ‘unaccusative’ constructs as ‘Close this dialog box when download completes’ and ‘Sit back and relax while Windows 98 installs on your computer’. The present paper takes the discussion further in terms of ‘fog’ and ‘inflation’, ‘unaccusatives’, superfluity and excessive Latinity, tautological phrasing, and such lexical curiosities as overwrite used to mean ‘replace’.

The English creole now known as ‘Pitkern-Norfolk’ is spoken as a community language only on the widely separated Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Scholars divide the pidgins and creoles of English into two broad types: Atlantic and Pacific. Logically, the creole that arose as a consequence of the mutiny on the Royal Navy's H.M.S Bounty in 1789 should straightforwardly belong in the Pacific group, but internal evidence indicates, paradoxically, that it is an Atlantic rather than a Pacific Creole.

In the biracial southern American state of Mississippi, the Chinese represent a “third culture,” an enclave with their own distinct Mississippi Chinese (MC) culture and community. The MC have learned to negotiate culturally and linguistically between white and black communities, developing speech strategies influenced by both Southern Genteelism and Confucianism. This essay begins with a review of deference, a key rhetorical feature used with particular adroitness by MC living in the Delta. Deference is defined as the courteous yielding to others and may occur in two forms: accommodation (i.e., making the non-MC speaker feel comfortable and welcome) and topic shifting (i.e., changing the subject of conversation). Next, the article includes examples of how this feature has changed or subsided in the speech of urban MC and concludes with some possible reasons for this shift.

“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.

‘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.