He added that there could be a range of prices to attract more leisure passengers on the route.Sir John also disclosed that Americans were giving the Heathrow Express the cold shoulder.”Apart from people from New York, Americans don’t think trains are for respectable people,” he said.Mr Egan spoke as BAA, which runs seven airports in Britain including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, announced 1998-99 pre-tax profits of pounds 516m – 7.5 per cent up on the 1997-98 figure.. FARES ON Britain’s most expensive railway could increase – even though passenger targets have not been met, it was disclosed yesterday. A one-way ticket on the Heathrow Express, which takes passengers on a 17-mile journey between London’s Paddington station and the west London airport, currently costs pounds 10. The airport operator British Airports Authority, which runs the service, said increasing prices at peak times was “an option”.
BAA said that the service,launched in June 1998, carried 13,000 passengers a day – below its first-year target of 15,000.The chief executive, Sir John Egan, said that business travellers did not consider the pounds 10 fare to be too high – some thought it too low. A range of prices might soon be introduced to attract more leisure passengers to the route.Sir John added that Americans were giving the Heathrow Express the cold shoulder:”Apart from people from New York, Americans don’t think trains are for respectable people,” he said.Sir John was speaking as BAA, which runs seven UK airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, announced 1998-99 pre-tax profits of pounds 516 million – a 7.5 per cent increase on the 1997-98 figure..

ONE ASSUMES Microsoft’s new dictionary of world English, the first entirely new English dictionary to be produced for some 30 years, will contain a definition for the phrase “killer app”. After all, Bill Gates’s fortune rests on his recognition that such a thing – a software application that buyers had to have – was indispensable in transforming a hobbyists’ toy into a global industry. Since then Microsoft has proved remarkably adept in producing “killer apps” and in adding a fratricidal spin to the simple enthusiasm of the geeks’ coinage.
Microsoft’s “killer apps” have often risen to prominence over the slaughtered bodies of rival products. So it was understandable, when it was revealed that it was to enter the genteel world of lexicography, that some reporters were anxious for the established fauna; the writing was now on the screen, they suggested, for established publishers such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s.I doubt it myself (even though it would be no bad thing if the OED were terrorised into lowering the price for its dictionary on CD-Rom) – Microsoft scholarship bears about the same relation to the real thing as an inflatable paddling pool does to Lake Windermere, as anyone who has tried to immerse themselves in the shallows of the Encarta Encyclopedia will have discovered.

But it is possible the writing is on the screen for the very regional variations that the dictionary – which will appear as a book and as a CD-Rom – sets out to record, since the Internet and computers are the most powerful factors in the creation of a homogenised “world English”. What preserves local peculiarities of speech are isolation and distance, the features of the linguistic landscape eroded every day by the growing webs of electronic communication.Microsoft is likely to make some of this language itself – Bill Gates’s new book, Business The Speed of Light, concludes with a glossary of terms that may well have greater currency in the next century than they do now, including “bandwidth”, to describe a person’s intellectual capabilities and “data-mining”, to describe the new skill of interpreting raw information for profit. But it will never own the language.Conspiracy theorists may see this as an attempt to corner the market in utterance, even to advance a particular revolutionary view of the world.They needn’t worry. Mr Gates will find that, like the World Wide Web itself, spoken English has a way of reshaping itself around any attempt to control or fix it..