Dictionaries of English today draw upon a tradition that is almost 400 years old. Depending on your point of view, this is a tradition of competition and cross-fertilization, of plagiarism and lexicographical incest, or something that has wavered and wandered between high originality and low theft. Some commentators have even argued that many English dictionaries are just variations on a common text that has been evolving since the 17th century.

The language of bureaucracy often intimidates, and is particularly intimidating for such people as immigrants in Britain and ordinary people in countries where English is the first language of officialdom.

A wide range of newsletters, clippings and cuttings, catalogues and correspondence arrives (and is welcomed) on ET's editorial desk. From the mass that goes into our files TOM MCARTHUR has sorted out a mélange of missing apostrophes, new model words, foreignisms, media usages and neologisms that – somehow or other – come within ET's brief.

Variants of Norse were at one time spoken in many parts of Britain and Ireland, their last remnants being the Norn of the Northern Isles. How well has that language fared in Orkney, and how has it blended with English?

The telephone and the tape recorder have separately added new dimensions to the art of oral communication. Their coming together in the telephone answering machine, however, has produced a third dimension all of its own.

In the first issue of ET we took a look at the many uses of ‘Anglo’. Now, on behalf of fellow Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, freelance writer JANE MARSHALL argues for less ambiguity and more accuracy in the British use of an ancient affix.

Responding to Stephen Wade's ‘Anglo-Irish Literature’ (ET8, Oct 86) EOGHAN MAC CORMAIC has written from, Long Kesh Prison in Northern Ireland and PÁDRAIG Ó CONCHÚIR from East Ham in England.

The most venerable purism of them all in English has been resistance to Latinate words, and the most vigorous resistance fighter was William Barnes of Dorset.

The tenth in our series on the literatures of English around the world argues that the classics of English literature are less transparent to the modern eye than might be supposed.