Sometimes the world directly impinges even on language journals. This notably happened to ET69 (18:1, Jan 02), the first issue after terrorists destroyed New York's Twin Towers. In that issue, I looked at some of the usage of this new kind of terrorism and those who have to deal with it, focusing first on the terror (notably at Ground Zero in New York), then on the words of George W. Bush, who was described by one journalist as ‘moving from the quiet language of grief to the rowdy colloquialisms of the Old West’, and finally to Islamic expressions both co-opted by al-Qaeda and used by Western writers.