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When I lived in Islington (until a few months ago) our local swanky wine bar had a rather friendly American waitress.

One day she was talking to us and said something about "British English".

"You mean", I found myself saying, "English".

"British English" doesn't really exist. The term is not precise enough; you could be referring to Ulster English ("put the semtex down noi"), Welsh English ("our Siôn can only drrrink 10 pints"), Scottish English ("ye no have a wee drrram afore ye drive"), Northern English ("Now't work at t'Job Centre luv") etc, etc.

To save time southern English, of the type technically called "Standard English", is called "English". No need to call it "English English". We invented it (although apparently the Turks had a hand) so we get to keep its name.

Recently I've been writing "role" even though I believed it should be spelt "rôle". But I'm always a little distrustful of extended character sets - they may not translate very well at the other end. Also, I can't remember the Alt code for it (incidentally it's ATL 0244).

So I installed a new Konfabulator widget which allows you to select accents for pasting into documents. Turning out to be quite useful.

Since then I've found out that, according to my dictionary, "role" doesn't need the ciconflex after all. However, when applying for jobs in Europe, I think it would be expected, even though I always write in English.