The text is the editor's introduction to The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible to be published in 2004.

THOUGH it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly printed. This is not to say either that it is badly printed or that absolute perfection can be achieved, but that the text and its presentation can be improved. First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these can be revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators' own decisions as to how it should read. Second, the presentation of the text – spelling, punctuation and formatting – interferes with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is. This article continues to explore the criteria used behind the publication of this new work.

The lack of an official (British or American) language academy is regularly compared to the situation in France with its time-honoured Académie Française. All too often, however, a passing imprecise reference is made to the French Academy; all too often it is lumped together with other academies; and all too often the true nature of the work of such academies is ignored. This paper takes a closer look at some of the foreign academies, considers why there is no academy in Britain or America, discusses the only existing official academy of English (based in South Africa), and considers foreign academies' attitudes to English.

It is probably safe to say that whenever an expert encounters their field of expertise outside of science or academia, they shudder at misrepresentations, over-simplifications or flat out untruths. This sort of thing sometimes happens to me when I indulge in a bit of couch potato lounging and come across remarks about English or language in general on sitcoms. Thanks to Netflix, I can watch all the shows I missed when they first aired. I say this so that you, dear reader, will understand why my focus is on shows that aired several years ago and are now run as repeats or binge watched via streaming.

The aim of this short article is to offer a belated defense of L. M. Boyd (author of a daily, nationally syndicated column ‘Trivia’ in numerous newspapers throughout the USA) against a critique published in English Today over a decade ago by Alan S. Kaye (2006), and present arguments in support of Boyd's beleaguered claim. Kaye (2006: 54) writes:

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.

One new feature of English Today in this issue, and for future issues, is The ET Column, where we'll be asking people in the know – academics, broadcasters, educators, linguists, teachers and others concerned with English worldwide – to write a column for the journal on issues of controversy, debate, work in the field, and matters of topical and immediate interest. In this issue, David Graddol is writing from India, where he's currently researching English Next: India.

Sameness and difference across two nations and languages. In order to begin the discussion regarding a sitcom from American television used in a Brazilian classroom, I believe it is necessary to discuss the situation of the world as we know it at the beginning of the 21st century. Using the theories of the Brazilian sociologist Renato Ortiz (1994) as the basis for this discussion, it is possible to differentiate between the terms global and world-systemic (or mundial). In this view, global refers to the economic and technological processes at work in the modern day world, while world-systemic refers to the domain of culture. The category world is linked to the global, but signifies a world-view, a symbolic universe which is specific to the historic moment in which we live.

Sometimes, less can be more. In ET's twenty years of publication, this issue has the smallest number of contributions ever listed: seven titles in all, whereas traditionally there have been ten or more. It also has the usual number of pages (sixty-four), which means that some or all of the articles are way beyond our long-established norm. Yet at some point this had to happen.

English dialects demonstrate considerable variation in their pronominal systems (see for example Trudgill & Chambers, 1991 and Hernández, 2011). In England, pronouns in the north east of the country – the urban areas of Tyne and Wear and Teesside and the counties of Durham and Northumberland (hereafter NEE) – are often different from those found in Standard English (SE). The most extensive modern accounts of NEE pronouns are Beal (1993) and Beal, Burbano–Elizondo and Llamas (2012), but because they appear in chapters dealing with a wide range of morphosyntactic topics, the coverage is necessarily brief. This article is able to offer a more detailed overview of the morphology of NEE pronouns, based on a sizeable naturalistic corpus of vernacular writing.

I first heard of the term ‘Chinglish’ when I was at Baiduizi (白堆子) Beijing Foreign Languages School in the 1970s, through Janet Adams’ book, From Chinglish to English. The book contained 60 short dialogues in simple American English. It was meant to be teaching us colloquial English, compared to, I suppose, the textbook English written by Chinese teachers. I found the term Chinglish rather odd, and it was an odd thing for us pupils at that particular school to be made aware of, because the school was, quite literally, the only school in China at the time where foreigners were directly teaching Chinese children foreign languages and cultures. Few of these foreign teachers had formal teaching qualifications, and they were not using any textbooks written by Chinese teachers, but in their own ways using material the school compiled specially for the pupils. It was a form of audio-lingual and direct method. The language we were taught was pretty colloquial and we did not, as far as I could tell, speak Chinglish that the examples in Adams’ book illustrated.

IN BEIJING, on 4 November 2003, L. G. Alexander – for many years the world's foremost author of English language teaching materials – was formally commemorated. A bronze statue was raised in his honour in the grounds of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), the publishing house of the Beijing Foreign Studies University and one of China's largest schoolbook publishers. The statue was jointly sponsored by FLTRP and Pearson Education Asia.

The contents of this issue reflect the diversity of English today, as a world language, and as a language of diverse functions and possibilities, with contributions from Asia, South Africa and Europe. The first article by Kingsley Bolton looks at issues related to Asian Englishes, and attempts to survey major questions relating to the spread of English in the region. The second article by Rajend Mesthrie focuses on the role of English in contemporary South Africa and debates relating to the maintenance of African languages among young people in the post-apartheid era. One point that emerges from both articles is that English in both locations is seen as a middle-class language, or, at least, a language of middle-class aspiration.

To the making of wordbooks there is no end, and a recent addition to the long list is the Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary (1987), compiled by MARTIN H MANSER and NIGEL D TURTON (with a preface by DAVID CRYSTAL). Its publishers describe it as ‘a unique new dictionary which combines the elements of thesaurus, usage guide, lexicon and historical survey’. The PWD has 838 pages, and costs £4.95 in the UK, $12.95 in Canada, $16.95 in Australia, and $19.99 in New Zealand; there is no indication of how many words are covered. The three columns reproduced below show how the compilers have combined snappy, stripped-down definitions with boxed notes about usage and etymology. The PWD is an entertaining book, marred only by the quality of the paper used for the first edition.

A short guide to formal address in English

Starts with excerpt from Geoffrey Hughes, Words of War (ET17, 1989). The lexicon of war in the twenty-first century. The major development since this article was published (1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down) was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, now styled ‘9/11’. This used a stupefyingly original strategy of attacking the heart of America's capitalist and military establishment with the unconventional weapons of civilian aircraft and kamikazi pilots. Indeed, the bombing was a more ruthless variation of Pearl Harbour, being a hijack, less damaging in terms of hardware, but far more devastating in its effect on national morale and its propaganda impact. On a smaller scale, suicide bombings have now become relatively common.

The following interview with Christine Pickering, an instructor of English as a foreign language at Duksung Women's University, Seoul, South Korea, discusses teaching English to North Korean refugees with People for Successful Corean Reunification (PSCORE). A non-profit nongovernmental organization and human rights-national unification initiative, PSCORE was founded in 2006 in Seoul and has an office in Washington, D.C., with support from the U.S. State Department. PSCORE offers a one-on-one education program and free volunteer tutoring in computers, languages, mathematics, and other subjects, serving some 140 North Korean refugees as they adjust to life and employment competition in South Korea. The interviewers thank Mr. Bada Nam, PSCORE secretary general, and Ms. Jeongeun Ahn, PSCORE research manager, for approving the interview. The interview questions were prepared by Alzo David-West, and the interview was conducted in person by Sora Suh on August 1, 2012, at a PSCORE teaching location in Seoul. All personal names of North Korean refugee students have been removed.