Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, first published in 1937, ran to 8 editions culminating in 1984 and is widely acknowledged as the definitive record of twentieth-century British slang. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (NPD) maintains the tradition impressively, enhanced by a more conventional approach to citing sources, a broader focus to include examples of colloquial and vernacular vocabulary worldwide and prominence given to usage since 1945. A thousand new entries from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean, and increased representation of the language of social media, document linguistic innovation and/or reflect more sophisticated lexical data capture since the previous print edition of 2006. The 19 pages of introductory text outline criteria for inclusion, describe the structure of entries and provide a fascinating set of observations on slang drawn from Partridge's many published works. With over 60,000 entries the second edition of NPD is complemented for the first time by Partridge Slang Online (PSO), a resource which offers new ways to access and interrogate the data.

Macao, a former colony of Portugal, is located in the western side of the Pearl River estuary, adjoining the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone and facing the South China Sea. It is much smaller than its ‘big brother’ Hong Kong, having a total land area of 29.5 sq km and a population of around 540,000, of which 94.3% are ethnic Chinese (DSEC, 2011).

The IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) site has been on-line since 1997 and began as a resource developed to teach actors how to pronounce various accents and dialects of English. Created by theater scholar and dialect coach Paul Meier, the new site has expanded its already fantastic variety of information. The site's new navigation features include a searchable database and a global map that make it very accessible to specialists and non–specialists of English. Performers around the world (the site has over one million hits a year) use the site to research accents and dialects for English-speaking performances. IDEA's audience has expanded beyond theater professionals to users in academe in the social sciences and humanities as well as international business. The site is also relevant for anyone who has an interest in the ways that location and culture influence the spoken English language.

There is nothing innately funny or humorous about English spelling, though its vagaries have lent themselves to efforts in that way:

The combination of possibly with can't and couldn't seems to me on the increase. Or perhaps I just notice it more since I've been living in France. For in French there is no direct equivalent of possibly. You have probablement (= probably), but there is no French word *possiblement. What, then, is going on when you find in English, to take a recent example, ‘For all the malfunctions of the past few years, it's assumed the structure of British society can't possibly be refashioned’ (standfirst to an article by Marina Hyde, The Guardian, 7 July 2012)?