Technologies are beginning to blend our experience of digital and physical realities. We exchange data (images, videos, messages, etc.), present ourselves to the rest of the world on social media, network, and even perform a larger number of tasks than in person. As our world and ways of life keep on changing, so do words. The aim of this article is to examine the coinage of blends (i.e. smog-type [<smoke + fog] words) as a response to the blended realities that have emerged from the use of new technologies.

Grammars, dictionaries, usage manuals and other linguistic references are traditionally categorized along a spectrum running from prescriptivist to descriptivist, yet for years problems with this system of categorization have been noted. Forty years ago Geoffrey Pullum cautioned against confusing methodology and motives when applying the ‘descriptive’ or ‘prescriptive’ labels (1974: 77–78). A few years later Emma Vorlat suggested a middle ground, that grammars codify the language along a continuum of prescriptive–normative–descriptive, that is codification based on arbitrary rules – usage by social elites – description without value judgment (1979: 129). Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade noted that Vorlat's categories are not discrete, with eighteenth-century grammars increasingly basing prescriptions on descriptions of actual usage as the century progressed (2000: 877). María Rodríguez-Gil further noted that prescriptive grammars often base their advice on description of the language of social elites (2003: 190). Joan Beal characterized Robert Lowth's eighteenth-century grammars as both ‘normative’ and ‘descriptive’ (2004: 106). And Robin Straaijer has noted that ‘it seems useful to view prescriptivism and descriptivism as being independent from one another rather than diametrical opposites’ (2009: 67–68). Yet, perhaps because of the baggage carried by the two terms, to date no one has made the leap to conclude that the two terms address entirely different domains altogether – Straaijer approached the brink but did not leap. Prescriptivism and descriptivism do not exist along the same continuum.

English control verbs take infinitival complements that include the particle to:

1. (1)

   1. a. She tried to read one book each week.

   2. b. She promised to read one book each week.

Is grammar real or it it just a concept? The following is the opening sentence of the abstract of an article in the Journal of Linguistics, of November 2005: ‘This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax.’ There has been for many years a divide in what is meant by grammar. For the general public (and in most of the ET articles that deal with it), grammar is understood to refer to a set of abstract terms for defining the forms of words and how they are related in sentences. For some people, however, particularly some linguistics professionals in universities, it is something real to be discovered, and grammatical terms are the means of explaining it. The quotation above is an example of the latter use. If you were unfamiliar with this approach, you might initially take the word lexicon here to mean (as the entries in dictionaries indicate) a list of the words in a language, but then might wonder how a phrase can be said, as here, to ‘originate’ in the lexicon (and whether you can really use the phrase ‘the syntax’ like that).

The English language is no longer any one nation's monopoly; practically every nation on earth has a stake in it. This is the overall thrust of the book in the spotlight. The amazing journey of the language from a none-too-conspicuous dialect once spoken on a part of a tiny island off the north-western coast of Continental Europe to a language of wider communication across the world is the topic that the book engages with. In the ten chapters that make up this book, Urszula Clark surveys the current state of the language in its worldwide spread, along with the inevitable phenomenon of the emergence of new regional varieties or ‘Englishes’.

Well, I have been called some things in my time, but never, never a ‘purist’! I have spent my life attacking language purists, and purists have spent their lives attacking me. So to see myself introduced thus at the end of Aysha Viswamohan's interesting paper on ‘Code-mixing with a difference’ (ET79: Jul 04) was quite a shock. ‘Many purists like David Crystal believe…’

Spelling variation is something that all English users often come across and Australians are no exception. The Langscape 1 survey conducted in 1998 examined a number of lexemes with more than one spelling in a number of varieties of English including Australian English (AusE). This study presents the results of two later surveys that were conducted online in 2005 and 2013 and included a selection of the lexemes also examined in the Langscape survey. The present study concentrates on two types of spelling variation: the spelling of the classical digraphs ae/oe as in aesthetic and diarrhoea and the preservation of e before suffixes as in likeable and judgement. The purpose is to see if the spelling of ‘the extra letter’ is preferred or whether the simpler spellings are becoming more common in Australian English. The possible American English (AmE) influence also comes into question as it has been shown by previous research that Americans are more likely to use the shorter spellings than either British English (BrE) or Australian English users (see, for example, Peters 1998 for the results of the first Langscape survey).

There are two main ways to communicate messages linguistically: verbally and non-verbally. In verbal communication, the message is transmitted by means of such devices as stress, intonation and pausing. An example of stress is the word object which has differentmeanings when stresseddifferently, as in obˈject and ˈobject. The first is a verb which means ‘disagree’. The second is a noun which means ‘material thing’. An example of intonation is the expression What a beautiful day! which expresses different feelings when said with different intonations. With a fallingintonation, it is said perfunctorily. With a fall-riseintonation, it is said enthusiastically. With a rise-fall intonation, it is said sarcastically. An example of pausing is the expression Don't eat that honey. When the pause is after that, that refers to an object and honey refers to a person, meaning ‘darling’. When the pause is after honey, honey refers to an object. So, the listener is ordered not to eat the honey. These devices are extensively covered in Roach (2009), Carr (2012), Odden (2014) and Kennedy (2016), among others.

In November 1974 a murder took place which, both at the time and in retrospect, provided British journalists with material for countless articles. Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (generally referred to as ‘Lord Lucan’) apparently killed his children's nanny with a blunt instrument, attacked his wife, and then fled his Belgravia home. His whereabouts since then, and even (despite the fact that he was declared dead in the High Court in 1999) the question of whether or not he is still alive, continue to be a matter of sporadic discussion in the media and among the general public. As British National Corpus (BNC) evidence shows, Lord Lucan is now sometimes lumped together in the conversation and writings of the British with other creatures and objects whose existence is the stuff of legend rather than of scientific certainty:

The Canary Islands are very well known as an all-year-round tourist resort, thanks to their mild climate. References to the Islands have been many and varied since ancient times. Caught between legends and reality, the Canaries were described as marvellous islands on the limits of the world. They were referred to as ‘the Isles of the Blest’, the Hesperides or the Elysian Fields by the Greek poets of the Golden Age.

This paper identifies and describes five major varieties of Cameroon English (hereafter CamE) in Cameroon audio-visual materials. These five ‘audio-lects’ are Pidginized, Mainstream, Near-RP, Americanized and Frenchized CamE. The paper argues that these audio-lects mostly tie with real-life CamE, but differ from the latter phonostylistically. The utterances of 80 Cameroonian actors, actresses and musicians excerpted from 100 audio-visual materials constituted data for the paper. The audio-visual materials and artists were randomly selected to represent, as much as possible, CamE speakers from different socio-cultural spheres within Cameroon. The findings indicate that these audio-lects largely resemble real-life CamE varieties, which reflect the socio-ethnic, academic and professional diversity of CamE speakers.

A review of the category ‘Sexual orientation’ in John Ayto's new dictionary (see also p. 58) and a consideration of ‘queer’ slang at large

Naming varieties of the Expanding Circle is a very controversial and much debatable issue (see Nelson & Proshina, 2020); therefore, it is a high-priority, pressing question, brought up for timely discussion by the English Today journal. Those who are negative or hesitant about the legitimacy of these varieties, prefer speaking about English in a country – for example, English in China. However, this naming proves to be deficient as it is ambiguous and, in a way, exclusive. Its ambiguity lies in the fact that this naming can embrace speakers of any variety, i.e., of all three Circles (see Kachru, 1985), who happen to be in China. On the other hand, it excludes those Chinese speakers of English who have left China, either as emigrants or temporarily, though they use English while abroad. This means that the descriptive phrase English in China lacks its terminological nature.

Reflections on the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary and its mother book, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

The English language was first taken to Ireland in the late twelfth century and enjoyed a modest position in late medieval Irish society, a position which betrayed no sign of the later dominance of English in Ireland as in so many countries to which the language was taken during the period of English colonialism. The fate of the English language after initial settlement was determined by the existence of Irish and Anglo-Norman as widely spoken languages in the country. Irish was the continuation of forms of Celtic taken to Ireland in the first centuries BCE and the native language of the great majority of the population at the time settlers from Britain first arrived in Ireland. Anglo-Norman was the form of French used by the nobility in England and particularly in the marches of south and south-west Wales, the region from which the initial settlers in the south-east of Ireland came.

English spelling has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to learn, whether for native speakers of English or for those who learn it as an additional language. An additional problem for EFL learners is that there are two somewhat different systems to choose between: the British system and the American one. As Bondesen (2004: 4) points out, ‘although the two spelling systems are much more similar than they are different, there is variation between them.’ (For surveys of some of the main differences see Trudgill & Hannah, 1994; Carney, 1997.) The spelling discrepancies between the two varieties are systematic, and originate in large part from American spelling reform as a symbol of ‘linguistic independence’ (Knowles, 1997), and from the work of early American linguists such as Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. The aim of this article is to investigate the spelling preferences of English users in a few regions outside Britain and the United States, and to establish whether any clear patterns of regional variation are discernible.