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.

The third of a four-part gazetteer of the basic geopolitical vocabulary of the English language, dealing with the facts, fancies, fallacies, ambiguities and subtle implications of such words. For convenience of presentation, the material is not always in strict alphabetical order.

SHEILA BURKE, a primary school teacher in England, describes how she came to terms with information and communication technology in the classroom (first of two articles)

The aim of this short article is to offer a belated defense of L. M. Boyd (author of a daily, nationally syndicated column ‘Trivia’ in numerous newspapers throughout the USA) against a critique published in English Today over a decade ago by Alan S. Kaye (2006), and present arguments in support of Boyd's beleaguered claim. Kaye (2006: 54) writes:

Sameness and difference across two nations and languages. In order to begin the discussion regarding a sitcom from American television used in a Brazilian classroom, I believe it is necessary to discuss the situation of the world as we know it at the beginning of the 21st century. Using the theories of the Brazilian sociologist Renato Ortiz (1994) as the basis for this discussion, it is possible to differentiate between the terms global and world-systemic (or mundial). In this view, global refers to the economic and technological processes at work in the modern day world, while world-systemic refers to the domain of culture. The category world is linked to the global, but signifies a world-view, a symbolic universe which is specific to the historic moment in which we live.

Is the language really in need of protection, anywhere in the world? If it is, who could be the protectors? A freelance journalist offers some comments on usage gurus and linguistic popes.

The text is the editor's introduction to The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible to be published in 2004.

THOUGH it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly printed. This is not to say either that it is badly printed or that absolute perfection can be achieved, but that the text and its presentation can be improved. First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these can be revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators' own decisions as to how it should read. Second, the presentation of the text – spelling, punctuation and formatting – interferes with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is. This article continues to explore the criteria used behind the publication of this new work.

The sequel to ‘The coordinated President’, the article on George Bush's style that appeared in ET24, Oct90

The grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826), according to Monaghan (1996), was the author of the best selling English grammar book of all times, called English Grammar and first published in 1795. Not surprisingly, therefore, his work was subjected to severe criticism by later grammarians as well as by authors of usage guides, who may have thought that Murray's success might negatively influence the sales figures of their own books. As the publication history of the grammar in Alston (1965) suggests, Murray was also the most popular grammarian of the late 18th and perhaps the entire 19th century, and this is most clearly reflected in the way in which a wide range of 19th- and even some 20th-century literary authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned Lindley Murray in their novels. Examples are Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871–2), Charles Dickens, in several of his novels (Sketches by Boz, 1836; Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9; The Old Curiosity Shop 1840–1; Dombey & Son, 1846–8); Oscar Wilde (Miner and Minor Poets, 1887) and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1918) (Fens–de Zeeuw, 2011: 170–2). Another example is Edgar Allen Poe, who according to Hayes (2000) grew up with Murray's textbooks and used his writings as a kind of linguistic touchstone, especially in his reviews. Many more writers could be mentioned, and not only literary ones, for in a recent paper in which Crystal (2018) analysed the presence of linguistic elements in issues of Punch published during the 19th century, he discovered that ‘[w]henever Punch debates grammar, it refers to Lindley Murray’. Murray, according to Crystal, ‘is the only grammarian to receive any mention throughout the period, and his name turns up in 19 articles’ (Crystal, 2018: 86). Murray had become synonymous with grammar prescription, and even in the early 20th century, he was still referred to as ‘the father of English Grammar’ (Johnson, 1904: 365).

IN BEIJING, on 4 November 2003, L. G. Alexander – for many years the world's foremost author of English language teaching materials – was formally commemorated. A bronze statue was raised in his honour in the grounds of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), the publishing house of the Beijing Foreign Studies University and one of China's largest schoolbook publishers. The statue was jointly sponsored by FLTRP and Pearson Education Asia.

In many ways, Dalzell's is an exemplary slang dictionary, as one might expect from so experienced a slang lexicographer. Slang dictionaries do not usually explain the principles underlying inclusion, the selection of headword forms, the ordering of senses and the designation of country of origin, although this information is vital to any careful user.

YINQUAN WANG in Nanjing, China, considers the ease with which English absorbs words from other languages and how such words are currently handled in the newsmagazines ‘Time’ and ‘Newsweek’

It was the late Robert Hughes's remarkable TV series and book on modern art, The Shock of the New, first seen in the early 1980s, that with its title so deftly captured the both the excitement and the puzzlement to the beholder of creative novelty and innovation. And it is in many ways a self-fulfilling phrase, since epigrammatic, yet meaning-laden titles and names are the stuff of the broadcast programmer and the namer of new products. The new can indeed be shocking to the beholder, and Hughes's title says it in a sharp, monosyllabic manner whose five-word cadence has both balance and rhythm. Shuffle the words – or render them in a different grammatical format (‘novelty shocks’, for example) – and it falls apart. Words applied to new things and events matter, because they need to be repeated and, the makers hope, be talked about; resonance and repeatability are important to original things being launched on an unsuspecting public.

PAUL RASTALL takes a linguistic stroll round an English country garden

DAVID CRYSTAL comments wryly on some implications of the BBC's annual Reith Lectures, given this year on language and linguistics by Jean Aitchison, the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. A less developed version of the article appeared in ‘The Independent on Sunday’ in February 1996

A study of the use of football and baseball jargon in present-day American English

One of the problems of English spelling is the dual representation of the so-called ‘eyes’-words, rendered in discourse as -ise and -ize, both with high-frequency verbs such as modernise/modernize and rare coinages, as in burglarise/burglarize, etc. Eyes-words have historically evolved from two different language systems as two different forms with the same meaning, which have eventually come to coincide in their use in English with competing orthographic forms. The present paper first assesses the origin and development of the competition of these forms in the history of English from their introduction into English to their current configuration in British and American English; and then analyses their distribution in 13 varieties of English worldwide from the perspective of diatopic and text type variation. The study concludes, on the one hand, that the adoption of -ize in American English was an early 19th-century phenomenon while -ise spread in British English in the late 20th century; and, on the other, that the dissemination of -ize is constantly on the rise in many varieties, and the growing Americanisation of English, among others, is taken to be the most decisive element factor.

A student hovers over red-underlined text, clicks a button, and watches her errant writing replaced. The red line disappears. She continues typing, pausing to address the flagged words and phrases. When she stops typing, what appears before her is spotless – its errors coded out of existence by a modern grammar checker. Her teacher may never become aware of the artificial intelligence that has augmented her writing production. She submits her paper.