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

Randolph Quirk Well, the Survey is in part a collection of data. Now this makes it sound very dull – to contemplate filing cabinets filled with slips registering the repertoire of the educated, mature native speaker. But that is, of course, only part of what constitutes our data in the Survey. The Survey has always from the outset had two deliberate and quite specific aims: first, to collect samples of continuous usage of that mature, educated native speaker, and, secondly, to devise psycholinguistic techniques that would elicit from a sample of such adults constructions and usages which would only by a sort of happy accident come to be enshrined in the texts, whether spoken or written, that they actually recorded.

Kaleidoscope is a showcase for special varieties of English. Each issue of ET displays one or more samples, along with notes and illustrations to clarify certain words and usages or to add more information about them. Usually, we cover one ethnic or cultural variety, where English is in contact with an entirely different language, and one social, occupational or technical variety, where the special usages relate to a particular interest group. In this issue, the cultural variety is Standard English used for the discussion of cattle-breeding in Africa, and the technical variety is the language of video games.

Kaleidoscope is a showcase for special varieties of English. Each issue of ET displays one or more samples, along with notes and illustrations to clarify certain words and usages or to add more information about them. Usually, we cover one ethnic or cultural variety, where English is in contact with an entirely different language, and one social, occupational or technical variety, where the special usages relate to a particular interest group. In this issue, the cultural variety is Standard English used for the international discussion of Islam (where none of the users are native speakers of English), and the social-cum-technical variety deals with computers.

The Apple Corporation of America, makers of the famous Apple personal computer, are about to launch a brand new and very interesting new machine. Called the MacIntosh, it is a scaled down version of the recent (and very expensive) Apple Lisa … The Mac has its own 9 inch monochrome monitor and a single Sony 3.5 inch, 500kbyte disc drive. Although the option of a second disc drive is offered, few users are likely to take it. This is because the operating system and applications programmes will be in the form of ROM cartridges, leaving the disc for the user.

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.

Research into social roles and conversational gambits is steadily building up a picture of how people behave while talking. Interruptions, pauses, shifts in topic all reflect cultural and social attitudes and can express patterns of dominance, while the picture also includes such linguistic novelties as ‘diffident declaratives’ and ‘genderlects’.

On the 3rd November 1984 there appeared in The Guardian newspaper (London and Manchester) an article entitled ‘The earth lay gloog, the cattle bollowed deep’. It was the work of MAGGIE COOK, the founder of the Boscobel Poets of Hastings, and lies squarely in the tradition of English literate nonsense. The article is reproduced below, with a commentary by TOM McARTHUR.

The fourth 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.

Non-native users of English now outnumber the home-grown variety. How has this come about and what are its possible consequences? Why are millions of people now learning English as their ‘other tongue’? And what does it mean in the Eighties to be a foreign user of the English language?

Ambrose Bierce (1842–?1914) took part in the U.S. Civil War, dug for gold in the Black Hills of Dakota, worked for William Randolph Hearst on the San Francisco Examiner, and from time to time simply vanished. Finally, in 1913 he went south of the border into revolutionary Mexico and disappeared without trace. No one has ever learned what happened to him, but before he vanished he had left behind an enduring legacy: The Devil's Dictionary.