A professor of English reports on what may be a growing challenge to conventional orthography

A wide range of newsletters, clippings and cuttings, catalogues and correspondence arrives (and is welcomed) on ET's editorial desk. From the mass that goes into our files comes this mix of curious usages, arcane acronyms, neologisms and nonce forms.

The debate continues over whether the primacy of English should be enshrined in the U.S. constitution. Here, it takes the form of ‘language restrictionism’ versus ‘English plus at least one other language’ for every citizen who so chooses.

If lexical abbreviation is no more than a fringe to vocabulary proper, it is a most diverse and dynamic fringe

When a word like ‘abortion’ is in the dictionaries as well as the news, the definitions on offer can cast light on areas of change and uncertainty in the language.

Leading dictionaries do not always provide guidance on the incorporation of exotic words into the English spelling system, as this article abundantly demonstrates.

Chris Upward, Conference Organiser, Department of Modern Languages, Aston University.

Although ET is not a literary magazine, poetry and other genres of literature can nonetheless be grist to our linguistic mill. Canadian poet JUDITH COWAN here brings both the linguistic and the poetic together, to highlight in the free flow of her verse a style of speech now widely heard in North America today.

Horses have been important in the British Isles since at least Roman times, and users of English have taken their interest in horses with them to many parts of the world. As a result, the language abounds in expressions from the now largely vanished world of horses, coaches and hunting.

Thesauruses, or if you are more classically inclined thesauri, appear to be in vogue. In ET12 (Oct 87), we reviewed the latest Longman revision of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, which the company had first published in 1852. Then, in ET14 (Apr 88) we drew attention to the rather surprising facsimile reproduction by Bloomsbury of the original 1852 Roget. Now, it is both relevant and important to highlight some developments on the part of a third British publisher, Collins, who have brought out not one but two new wordbooks:

• The COLLINS School Thesaurus, ISBN 0-00-313318-4, £5.95: This is actually an Australian work, first published by Jacaranda Press in 1986 under the copyright of Macquarie University, New South Wales, and edited by Linsay Knight. The blurb claims ‘over 940 word groups, each consisting of words and phrases with closely related meanings’. The keyword in each group is explained, after which its associate words take their turn, as shown in the group for the verb fall reproduced below. The school thesaurus is a concise and powerful tool, lucidly organized and complemented by an easy-to-use index.

• The COLLINS Dictionary and Thesaurus in One Volume, 0-00-433186-9, £11.95; Collins already had a concise version of their standard dictionary of English, and a companion thesaurus. The trick here has been to combine them, so that the thesaurus section runs along the bottom of each page, in time with the alphabetic columns. The blurb says: ‘Here for the first time in one handy volume the reader is offered a general-purpose Dictionary and a Thesaurus in dictionary form’. And the blurb is right, as far as we know. Collins claim 71,000 dictionary references and 250,000 thesaurus ‘synonyms’. We already have on our shelves the volumes before they were unified, and have concluded that the unification is to be preferred. (See sample page.)