When I launched an online survey last December with the aim of learning about people's practices of looking up usage advice, I anticipated that searching for answers to grammar questions would not differ considerably from what are currently most common practices in searching for any kind of information. The answers are, as a rule, simply looked up online. From a group of 189 respondents, among whom the majority were university-educated language professionals such as linguists, editors, journalists and translators, more than half reported that they preferred consulting online rather than printed sources. The respondents below the age of 25 who reported looking up usage advice in printed books were few and far between (11%). The question that can be consequently raised is what implications this finding has for the future of the printed usage advice literature, which includes usage guides, all-in-one reference books we are researching in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. What is more, the number of sources that are available on the Internet is growing exponentially, and we need to probe more deeply into the matter to ask which of the available sources are in fact consulted.

In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English. These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.

The city of Medellín, Colombia's second largest, impresses the visitor. What was once the most dangerous city in the world has gone through a metamorphosis since drug lord Pablo Escobar's death in 1993. Indeed, in 2013, Medellín was named the World's Most Innovative City by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). ‘Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín… has in the past 20 years' reads the ULI's explanation (Wall Street Journal, 2013, online). Medellín is now poised to move forward with its innovative infrastructure projects, and looks to position itself as a center of international business, technology, and education (Alexander, 2015). One of the ways in which this new international outlook manifests itself is in the ever-increasing use of English in various areas of public life, notably in advertising and in shop names. Accordingly, this study explores and describes the use of English in shop names in a cross section of commercial areas in Medellín. First, we consider the use of English shop names in four shopping malls that serve customers from a variety of socioeconomic strata. Note that our use of ‘shop’ refers not only to stores but also restaurants, bars, travel agencies, and any other commercial enterprise. Second, we look at four public commercial corridors (retail streets or demarcated zones) in metropolitan Medellín through a similar lens. From these two commercial venues, we find that English use is common in Medellín's retail landscape and that it increases as the socioeconomic status of the target consumers increases.

Almost every Taiwanese university has some form of an English Department, some with straightforward names (e.g., Department of English) and some with ambiguous names (e.g., Department of Applied Languages). The so-called ‘Applied Courses’ are in fact English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses covering a range of Business and Tourism topics. While pursuing my doctorate I taught these courses as an adjunct lecturer in several universities. This experience continuously reaffirmed suspicions that one particular aspect of English language education was being neglected in Taiwanese secondary and tertiary education, that is, how to translate the names of the foods and dishes that make up the culturally laden Taiwanese cuisine.

English lexicography is undergoing a transformation so profound that both dictionary makers and users need new strategies to cope with the challenges of today's technologies and to take full advantage of their potential. Rundell has rightly stated that dictionaries have finally found their ideal platform in the electronic medium (2012: 15), which provides quicker and more sophisticated access to large data collections that are no longer subject to space restrictions. But the innovations go far beyond storage space and ease of access - customization, hybridization and user-input are amongst the most promising trends in electronic lexicography. Customization means that dictionaries can be adaptable, i.e. manually customized by the user, or even adaptive, i.e. automatically adapted to users’ needs on the basis of their behaviour (Granger, 2012: 4). Paquot lists genre, domain as well as L1 as examples of fruitful areas for customization (2012: 185). In the electronic medium, the barriers between different language resources such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, databases, writing aids and translation tools are disappearing, a development referred to as hybridization (Granger, 2012: 4). And the concept of user-input is exemplified by the well-known platforms Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary, both of which are online reference works based on contributions by users.

‘Some of our predecessors in the science of lexicography thought it was part of their duty to improve the English language,’ wrote an editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 1934 (Craigie, 1934: 26). ‘We have got beyond that stage, and consider that if it is to be improved it is not our business to do so, but record it as it was and as it is.’ Such claims for unbiased and objective descriptivism in dictionary-making became standard over the course of the twentieth century and are regularly repeated in dictionaries today. In the words of the first edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English, published in 1998 and reprinted in many other Oxford dictionaries, ‘A good dictionary reports the language as it is, not as the editors (or anyone else) would wish it to be’ (Pearsall, 1998: xv).

With more and more importance being attached to English since China's economic reform and opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s, the entire Chinese society has placed such high importance to the learning of English that at times it even plays a vital role for a person who plans to pursue further education and seek a better career (China Daily, 5 August, 2010). However, the end of 2013 saw an ‘unanticipated’ reform of policy on the National Matriculation English Test (henceforth, NMET) instituted by the Chinese Ministry of Education (henceforth, MOE). It was ‘unanticipated’ because in the past few years the Chinese government has invested heavily in English language teaching. As reported by ABC News (15 November, 2010), ‘China is pushing its people to learn English’, and English has thus occupied a prominent place in the life of the Chinese people because it is the ‘key’ to success (Chen, 2008: 16-37). According to this new policy, the once favorite ‘son’, i.e. English, may lose its predominance in the Chinese foreign language landscape and its importance may be diminished in exams. These changes are likely to cause a series of chain reactions since the dominant position of English largely lies in its weight in various levels of exams, with the NMET having the greatest impact. Given the determining factor of the NMET in Chinese people's attitudes towards English, NMET reform would almost undoubtedly change the current situation of English in China and it would be no exaggeration to say that it will have a foreseeable impact on various aspects of Chinese social life as well. In this article, I briefly review the causes for the ‘focus shift’ and attempt an analysis of the impact of the role of English in China in the future.

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.

Kamtok, an English-based expanded pidgin/creole in Cameroon, has many of the grammatical structures of its lexifier language. However, there are certain grammatical structures in this contact language which are not so obvious in its lexifier, though they may exist sparingly in spoken forms of the production of some native speakers. One of these is the serial verb construction (SVC). SVCs are ‘a series of two (or more) verbs [that] have the same subject and are not joined by a conjunction … or a complementiser … as they would be in European languages (Holm, 1988: 183).

Is English usage changing more rapidly than it was before? Judging by the decreasing time between editions of ‘Fowlers’ it would seem so: thirty-nine years between Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, from here on MEU1) and Gower's second edition (1965, from here on MEU2), and thirty-one years between the latter and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996, from here on NFMEU). This led Manfred Görlach to write in his review of NFMEU that ‘[t]imes change, and we (and usage) change with them. A new edition of Fowler's classic book is thus in order every thirty to forty years’ (Görlach, 1997).

With its subtitle ‘Prescriptivism and Language History’, Fixing English encompasses two senses of ‘fixing’: firstly, attempting to freeze the language at a particular historical moment and prevent it from changing further and, secondly, attempting to improve it and repair it of its faults and shortcomings.