Following on Susan Ridder's article ‘English in Dutch’ (ET44, Oct 95) and Pieter Loonen's and Ross Smith's articles on English in the European Union (ET46, Apr 96), a detailed survey of the effect in recent years of English on German and the Germans

The introduction from the writer's new book, A Dictionary of Cliches, Bloomsbury 1996, outlining a novel family of kinds of hackneyed and overused expressions

ADRIAN ROOM looks at occasional boobs and blunders in Britain's traditional newspaper of record

A consideration of how the everyday spelling system can be used more effectively than phonetic symbols in English pronunciation guides

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

KATE BURRIDGE places PC usage within the long tradition of euphemistic expression

A review of the problems learners of English can have with actual and borderline taboo usages in the United States

A review of Jess Sheidlower's ‘The F-Word’ and Reinhold Aman's ‘Maledicta XI’, together with a chronology of the lexicography of swearing