2001

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the World of English Summer Issue, in which we invite you to let your hair down (or if you haven't any, to let it grow) and forget, as far as you think wise, about exams, school and university (or, if you are an especially precocious pupil, kindergarten).

After a year of fundraising, Dominika Bosak, Anna Curyło, Kinga Drozd, Marta Huszcza, Agnieszka Lew, Natalia Piórkowska, and Daniel Zawadzki journeyed from Kłodzko to Burnsville, Minnesota. This article is about the different activities they did and their thoughts about America.

Host families

The environment is a hot issue in the UK. Since the 1980s, awareness has grown of the consequences of industrial pollution, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. More recently, the BSE beef crisis and the GM food controversy have made the British public even more sensitive to the appliance of science and agricultural error. We are turning into a nation of eco-worriers.

An incredible 24 million mobile phone text-messages are sent and received every day in Britain. The young, especially, love this way of communicating, but many academics and teachers are increasingly worried about the quality of English they use when sending an SMS.

Many words have been spoken and written about the September 11thtragedy, and just as many tears have been cried since then. Every single person's life will forever be altered. There isn't much that one can say to describe the magnitude of the tragedy; even seeing is not believing. But here are the thoughts and feelings of some students of the University of Scranton, just two hours away from New York City, about that fateful day.

"Slang" is the secret argot of a group of people who share a similar lifestyle, sub-culture or workplace. Its purpose is to conceal the meaning of what is being said from those outside of the group. The Polish slang used in prisons, for example, (grypserka) is meant to conceal what is being said from the prison guards.

"Business is business", "Time is money", - but is it right that "Anything goes"?

"Where there's muck there's brass" is an old northern English expression. It simply means that people will make money where there are raw materials - dirty, of course - such as coal. But what about the expression: "Where there's ethics there's brass"? It doesn't have quite the same ring. If such expressions are any guide, Anglo-Saxon societies clearly tend to think of business as a necessary but essentially dirty activity.

Except in New Orleans, Americans don't celebrate Carnival properly. So we fill the dreary season between New Year's Day and Easter with Oscar madness: lists, speculation and arguments and, when the big day comes, big parties in Hollywood and New York City, elsewhere a beer in front of the TV, and in London a middle-of-the-night mug of hot chocolate.

So just who are the development workers and how did they originate? Simon Jones, himself a former overseas development worker (ODW), gives us a thumbnail sketch of the people ex-President Mary Robinson (now United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) honours with a candle in the window of her official residence, Áras an Uachtarain, every Christmas.