This is the first issue of ET in the ‘post-McArthur era’, edited by a new team, that happily still includes Tom. In preparing this issue, the new members of the squad became even more aware of Tom's editorial skills, the effort he has put into making ET succeed over 23 years and his general lightness of touch. It is entirely appropriate that this first issue therefore contain something of the old and the new in English studies. We decided to print, in the first half of this issue, short extracts from 6 seminal ET articles from its first 10 years, and invite the original authors to provide extended updates and comments.

Updates on the statistics of English. Starting with excerpt from David Crystal, How many millions use English? (ET1, 1985). The author says: Reading this article again, that almost a quarter of a century on, the most noticeable change, it seems to me, has been in the amount and colour of the author's hair! That aside, I am struck by my final comment: ‘I shall stay with this figure for a while’ – a billion. It appears I stayed with it for a decade. In the first edition of my English as a Global Language (1997: 61) I raised my estimate, suggesting a middle-of-the-road figure of 1,350 million. In the second edition (2003: 69), a ‘cautious temperament’, I said, would suggest 1,500 million. And these days, having read the more sophisticated assessments by David Graddol and others, I am prepared to revise upwards again in the direction of 2 billion. In short, we have moved in 25 years from a fifth to a quarter to a third of the world's population being speakers of English.

Starts with excerpt from Jenny Cheshire, A question of masculine bias? (ET1, 1985). The author says; My 1985 article ended on an upbeat note, confidently predicting that as more people take care to remove masculine bias from their own English, so the language will gradually stop distorting our perceptions of women. The twenty-two years that have passed represent pretty much a generation of speakers, making this a good time to consider whether or not my confidence was misplaced. How successful have language reforms been?

Starts with excerpt from Geoffrey Hughes, Words of War (ET17, 1989). The lexicon of war in the twenty-first century. The major development since this article was published (1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down) was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, now styled ‘9/11’. This used a stupefyingly original strategy of attacking the heart of America's capitalist and military establishment with the unconventional weapons of civilian aircraft and kamikazi pilots. Indeed, the bombing was a more ruthless variation of Pearl Harbour, being a hijack, less damaging in terms of hardware, but far more devastating in its effect on national morale and its propaganda impact. On a smaller scale, suicide bombings have now become relatively common.

Starts with excerpt from John Dougill, English as a decorative language (ET12, 1987). Twenty years on English still decorates Japan. At the end of the 1980s, Japan's bubble economy burst and the country has been rectifying the ills of the past ever since. The drive to improve is a marked feature of the culture, and much has changed in the past twenty years. The number of ‘international Japanese’ has grown, as has the number of competent English speakers. Education has been freed up, English introduced into primary schools, and listening tests established in national exams. Yet the peculiarities of Japanese English (called Janglish or Engrish by some) continue to adorn the country's buildings, goods and items of clothing.

Starts with an excerpt from Michael Rundell and Penny Stock, The Corpus revolution (ET30, 1992). An update on the rise and rise of electronic language corpora and their impact on dictionaries. How dramatically the world has changed since Penny Stock and I wrote about the ‘Corpus Revolution’ in 1992.

At the time, it was not hard to predict that computer processing power and storage capacity would carry on doubling each year. It was already clear, too, that the arrival of the corpus would revolutionize the work of dictionary-makers – hence the title of our articles. These changes were well under way in 1992 and, sixteen years on, their effects are still being felt. In the process, dictionaries have got dramatically better – if by ‘better’ we mean that the description of language they provide corresponds more closely to the way people actually use words when they communicate with one another.

Starts with an excerpt from Braj B. Kachru, The sacred cows of English (ET16, 1988). The ‘Sacred Cows’ article has been a seminal piece for many reasons. It introduced the world to Braj's famous ‘Three Circles of English’ model. At roughly the same time, in the late 1980s, three pioneers in the field which was then known as ‘English as a World Language’ or ‘New Englishes’ came up independently with the idea of representing the spread of English in terms of concentric circles. Tom McArthur's ‘wheel model’ appeared in ET July 1987. Manfred Görlach, then editor of the journal English World Wide came up with a similar model, with some minor changes in a conference paper of 1988. It was only fitting that the co-editor of the third journal in the field, World Englishes, should have his own say. And it is in fact Braj's model that has come be the most widely accepted as the model with the best ‘fit’ for English as she has been spreading.

An analysis of dialect variability in the use of BE in the island of Bequia. Bequia (pronounced /bekwei/) is the northernmost of the Grenadine islands in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Like most of the Caribbean, Bequia has a long history of language contact, but most of the evidence for this must be inferred. It appears that the Carib population living on the island before European colonization settled Bequia in successive waves of migration ultimately originating from the coast of South America indeed the name ‘Bequia’ is said to derive from a Carib word becouya, meaning ‘Island of the clouds’, but as yet I have been unable to trace this etymon reliably to a particular Carib language. Based on what we know about St Vincent, and the limited mentions of Bequia in the eighteenth century, we can infer that, at times, there may have been contact between some combination of speakers of a Carib language or languages, French, English, African languages and/or possibly a relatively new creole-like or contact variety of English.

An in-depth account of how English speakers think about thinking, using perspectives from etymology, metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics addresses how we conceptually structure and linguistically categorize experience in order to render our world coherent and accessible. One of the ways we do so is through the creation of spatial metaphors. In cognitive theory, language is not regarded as a representation of objective reality, but rather, as the product of our interaction with the world as entities in three-dimensional space. The metaphors we use to structure experience conceptually are grounded in this interaction. Our ability to generate metaphors makes it possible for us to get a mental and linguistic grip on abstract concepts by representing them as tangible, concrete entities situated in space. Hence, from a cognitive perspective, metaphors are much more than occasional ornamental figures of speech occurring primarily in literary contexts; rather, they are all-pervasive components of everyday language and reflections of how we cognitively structure our world. It should come as no surprise then that, as we shall see, metaphorical expressions are particularly prevalent in the lexis of that most abstract of realms, the realm of thinking.

To what extent does the distinctiveness of Nigerian English come through in text messages? In the history of the English language certain developments have left significant linguistic marks on the language. As new developments and cultural forms occur, new words and styles of expression evolve with them and spread. This is true of the new linguistic style that is associated with the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) revolution in Nigeria since 2001. GSM has brought with it a variety of English that is situationally distinctive and context. GSM came to Nigeria with the licensing of MTN and Econet (now Celtel) in 2001 during the Obasanjo administration, after many years of decaying telecommunication infrastructure. Within a short time after the introduction of mobile telecommunication, almost a million subscribers mainly in the cities made a rush at possessing mobile phones and were willing to pay any tariff. N50 (50 naira) were paid per minute per call as against N15 per text message. This was said to be the highest rate in Africa, causing many subscribers to opt for text-messaging as a cheaper alternative.

International sports stars are often required to speak to the media after their performances. When Tiger Woods does so, it is noticeable that he makes use of the formulaic expression ‘I feel/felt like I’ as a means of introducing descriptions of, or generalizations about, his actions or motivations. Drawing on corpus data, this paper offers some observations about this expression in relation to its use by speakers (and to a lesser extent writers) of both American and British English, and also investigates the apparent disparity in frequency between instances of ‘she’ and ‘he’ when it is used.

Favourite etymologies from the world of tennis. At the mere mention of summer most of us think only of one thing: Wimbledon. And at the mere mention of Wimbledon everybody thinks of tennis. A summer without a Wimbledon tennis tournament is just about as unthinkable as fish without chips, Romeo without Juliet or the telly without Coronation Street. For two weeks at the height of summer the nation will be gripped with tennis fever. Matches will be played and replayed on our screens day and night and every volley, fault or service analysed by pundits and experts who convince us they know what they are talking about. But where did this game that spellbinds us for a fortnight come from?