Here, in one well-bound volume, are the first eight issues of Laurence Urdang's fascinating Language quarterly, Verbatim, originally having made their appearance between May 1974 and February 1976 but still as crisp and appetizing as fresh lettuce. The text is a linguistic feast, with some 170 items on the menu, luscious platefuls of tasty little snacks; not recommended for consumption at one sitting, or even two or three, but to be approached with the discrimination of a gourmet. Nowhere else, I think, could one so happily indulge an appetite for onomastics and toponymy and nounspeak; obstruency (labial), concatenants (or phonopedes) and homonymous antonyms; straightforward mayvendom and the more complex delights of homographic-heterosemantic-phonoglosses. It matters not a whit that the book reviews don't cover recent publications, for every one of them contains something of a timeless interest, and they display a wit and flair and above all a succinctness which put to shame the longwinded pedagoguery of the late lamented Times Literary Supplement. There is, for example, a stunningly informative review of George Steiner's After Babel which will doubtless be an eye-opener even to the SI member who indexed the labyrinthine complexities of that seminal monster. Enthusiastic amateurs participate at full gallop in pitched battles between recognized experts, on points of usage, etymology, and what-haveyou, recklessly flinging around words like 'ecdysiasts', 'nonnative' (which turns out to mean 'non-native'), and 'detetive' (disappointingly, merely a misprint of 'detective'). 'Binomials' are discovered to have no connection with mathematics. American scholars shamelessly display blind-spots in their awareness of Brenglish—as distinct from Amerenglish—usage. 'And to hell with Sir Quiller-Couch,' writes one of them defiantly, prompting me to search hopefully but in vain for a mention of Sir Gowers! The Brenglish equivalent of 'one-horse town', writes another, is 'one-eyed village': an expression I personally have never heard or read in more than 60 years. There's never a dull moment. Flashes of enlightenment and provocation streak across the pages like forked lightning. Frustration, too, though of an oddly pleasant kind, at the limitations of one's own vocabulary—and, in my own case, at the shortcomings of the three dictionaries which I keep by me for everyday use. All in all, a book to treasure and delight in, even though its index gives me the cold shivers. Some colleagues may think this a good index, except that it has no cross-references and no introductory note (particularly to explain the variant usages of typeface, capital initials, and inverted commas). To me, it smacks of extracting words from the text like collecting pebbles on a beach, for no better reason than that they happen to catch the eye. An excellent three-page article on the deterioration of English language teaching in American schools and its effects on standards of literacy, especially at the higher levels of education, has the following index-entries: 'age-promotion', English, Gresham's Law, The New York Times, They Don't Write English Like They Used to, who/whom. One of these is the title of the article, which does not adequately reflect its content; the other five are almost insultingly irrelevant from the user's point of view. Indexing of this type is repeated ad nauseam. People's names appear in the index exactly as they are printed in the text; of 14 persons named on page 36, surnames only are used for eight of them in the text, and surnames only are slavishly repeated in the index. To be almost brutally blunt, an index of 33 pages, three columns per page, 40-plus headings (no subheadings) per column, is little more than a mindless assemblage of words and numbers, an Autolycan ragbag, a gross and very distressing disfigurement of an outstandingly enjoyable and stimulating publicatio. Laurence Urdang is a lexicographer of international repute. His quarterly, Verbatim, is, in my opinion, one of the most valuable and quite the most enjoyable publication in the field of linguistics. Don't let anything stop you treating yourself to a copy of Verbatim. And solve your Christmas present problem by giving copies to all your word-loving friends and relatives. It really is (if I may make use of a binomial) a joy and a delight.