LANGSCAPE is a Cambridge University Press project associated with both ‘English Today’ and a new international usage guide for the year 2000 by Pam Peters, author of the ‘Cambridge Australian English Style Guide’ (1995). Like the Australian publication, the international work will be distinctive in its use of empirical evidence from computer corpora as well as data elicited from surveys of users of English round the world. Because English is a world language, any account of usage that is limited to one person's views and resources is inadequate. The first topic and questionnaire (‘The ubiquitous letter e’) appeared in ET53 (Jan 98), the second (‘To capitalize or not to capitalize’) in ET54 (Apr 98), the third (‘Differing on agreement’) in ET55 (Jul 98), the fourth (‘Permanent loans: plurals for Latin borrowings’) in ET56 (Oct 98), and the fifth (‘Jots and tittles’) in ET57 (Jan 99). See the accompanying box for further information on the Survey.

Does an increasing awareness of the sheer international variety in the English language complex necessitate a new pedagogy for a new century?

A novel view of how English might or should be modelled at the turn of the millennium – followed by some solicited comments

The following text constitutes the foreword by LOIS ALETA FUNDIS (reference librarian, Mary H. Weir Public Library, West Virginia, USA) to ‘Stumpers! Answers to Hundreds of Questions that Stumped the Experts’, edited by Fred R. Shapiro, Random House, New York, 1998. The answers thematically presented in this paperback (pp. xviii + 236, ISBN 0-375-70174-5, $12.95) were provided by US librarians in their own Internet discussion group, Stumpers!, which was started in 1992 by Anne Freeney, a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Rosary College (now Dominican University) in Illinois. Some wombats chanced to go along for the ride, and ET here honours them and their lexically and bibliographically gifted friends.

Reflections on some changes this century in what is taken to be worthwhile reading, looking in particular at how a trick of word-forming style was once used to highlight the brokenfulness of broken English.

— ‘The allrightfulness will be terrific’ (BBMSA, 52: see panel).

MICHAEL BULLEY considers that the time has come for a small but significant change in the phonetic representation of Standard British English

Complementing Yingquan Wang's account (ET57, Jan 99) of the significance of College English courses and examinations in China, a description of how English is on the move throughout the People's Republic

Although American engineers design and build some of the best machines in the world, their machines may be accompanied by instructions in the form of a booklet, an owner's or operator's manual, whose quality does not always match the level of the quality of the machines. All the customer hopes for is clarity and simplicity. ANDRÉ GABRIEL wonders why American engineering companies don't hire proof-readers

Some comments on the power and prestige of Californian usage at the end of the twentieth century