[Review published in New Learning Issue of Summer 2001]

When I recently informed the Oxford University Press that I was no longer living in the north-east of England, nor editing the (now defunct) Groupvine magazine, but had relocated to London and was editor of New Learning, I hardly imagined that the first review copy I would receive would be the enormous new edition of the Oxford Hachette French Dictionary.

Not altogether the sort of book, my immediate thought ran, that New Learning’s readers will find of overpowering interest. And then I thought again. After all, many, if not a majority, of our readers are teachers. Several of them are possibly linguists. There may even be some who fit into both categories. So what, I wondered, would this "Major New Edition" offer that was not available in previous editions, or is not on offer in rival publications?

I examined the "blurb" and my eye was caught by "nose job". I looked again. Yes, it was definitely "nose" job. I shook my head in disgust at the vulgarity of my reaction. Then I thought, just for the hell of it . . .

My word! (Pun intended.) There it was. "Blow job. To give sb a – . Tailler une pipe à qn." Wow! Didn’t have anything like that in the dictionaries of my youth! My memory winged back. I looked up pompier and it gave the mundane translation of Fireman. Ah well, everything changes; and nothing so ephemeral, perhaps, as pop culture and slang expressions. The memory that had feather-dustered my mind was of a jape of my adolescent period (I’ve almost grown out of it!) where you would ask a female to draw the outline of a house – a simple square. Then add a door. Then four windows. Then a chimney. Then some smoke. More smoke. More smoke. Even more smoke. Then: "Maintenant, faîtes moi un pompier". And you would check whether she actually tried to draw a fireman, or modestly blushed, thus revealing the extent of her sexual knowledge. Perhaps there’s a similar jape these days. Something to do with pipes.

But, jesting and vulgarity apart, this is an extraordinary dictionary, with thousands of new words. Words such as dot-com, technophobe, focus group, widget, alcopop and doofus. And, as a bonus, the centre pages contain a wealth of material on effective communication: correspondence, advertising, using the telephone, using email and the internet. Highly appropriate to NLP and education!