The current issue of Language in Society features four articles with a single topic in common – gender and language. For this issue, I realized that by jumping one paper already in hand over a couple of others I could achieve the felicitous result of a relatively unified issue – and now that Language in Society is at five issues a year, the “jumpees” will only have to wait two months for publication in any case. My usual practice is that articles are published in strict order of acceptance – very occasionally, an author will take so long to get the very last revision – the i-dotting and t-crossing and reference-checking – done that the article will lag in publication. Extremely long articles sometimes get delayed an issue. And once or twice I have speeded up publication of an article which languished an unfairly long time in the review process.

The ecological vocabulary of the Bella Coola, who speak a Salish language of the American Northwest Coast, shows a larger proportion of loanwords than of forms retained from the parent language. Over a period of centuries the Bella Coola were in contact with many non-Salish tribes, but the direction of their borrowing was highly selective. Although their most intimate contacts were with speakers of Athapaskan and Wakashan, the overwhelming proportion of their ecological loans are Wakashan. This selectivity is explained by cultural affinity rather than intimacy of contact. (Language and cultural history, sociolinguistics, lexical borrowing, ecological vocabulary, Northwest Coast, Bella Coola Indians.)

The music of everyday speech (hereafter MES) is a book for discourse analysts interested in incorporating a theoretically grounded account of sound production, or, prosody, into their research. Readers of Language in Society will find MES to be the first book of its kind. It includes an overview of phonological, discourse analytical, and interactional approaches to the analysis of prosody, as well as model prosodic analyses of the major research areas in discourse analysis. MES is a thorough presentation of how prosodic analysis can inform discourse analysis, unique in its coverage of material, excellence of presentation, and theoretical and analytical depth.

In 1971, women students at the Harvard Divinity School began protesting the use in their classes of BOMFOG (“brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god”) talk, the equation of the universal with the masculine exemplified by apparently generic uses of forms like he and man. Responding to reports of these protests in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's linguistics faculty wrote a letter to the editor explaining that English masculine forms were linguistically “unmarked” for gender and patronizingly assuring the protestors that “there is no need for anxiety or pronoun envy” (quoted in Livia, p. 3). Once launched, that phrase begged to be a title, and Anna Livia's enlightening book is a most suitable bearer. This is a volume from which linguists and others interested in the linguistic encoding of gender can learn much.

This article investigates the discursive dimensions of the Zika epidemic in Brazil. It focuses on the ways the sanitary crisis is talked about by mothers of babies born with microcephaly—a Zika-related syndrome. We examine the situated ways these mothers refuse the biomedical and bureaucratic scripts that are handed down to them by engaging with their new realities and fostering hope against the grain of bleak prognosis. To do so, we scrutinize a corpus that comprises media reports covering the health emergency and ethnographic interviews. Resorting to strategies such as inverse stories, timespace anchorage, and scalar reversals, mothers of Zika inventively plot against painful scripts while reimagining their kids’ future (as well as theirs) in the present. They hope pragmatist hope without teleology. This chronotopic movement sheds light on how somber plots can be twisted through (re)scaling projects, thus forging hopeful actions. (Hope, narratives, scale, plot, epidemics, agency)