This article gives a detailed description and discussion of seven applications for poor relief, as found in the archives of English County Record Offices. All letters were written by or for poor writers between 1795 and 1834. As the variety used in these letters is not ‘Standard’, nor ‘dialect’, the second part of the article is devoted to the question of how this variety relates (or does not) to traditional linguistic views on standardisation. Contrary to the prevailing ‘standard language ideology’, it will be claimed that the present letters can only be interpreted adequately through a linguistic theory ‘which treats all varieties of English equally and discards none’. … in writing the history of powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from enough. Adam Hochschild (2002: 104)

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An account of how and why a mysterious new word more or less replaced a once-universal predecessor

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A response to comments recently made by grammarians in ‘English Today’.