ENGLISH, like every living language, is a steadily evolving medium that reflects a world in transition. As the horizon of human experience expands, so does the need for fresh words and expressions. Journalists, as interpreters of the new and unusual, have a vital role to play in this process. At TIME, particularly, correspondents and writers constantly seek to enrich the idiom, and TIME's use of words has long been one of the magazine's most vivid characteristics.

Such mainstays of the vernacular as tycoon, kudos, pundit and socialite all gained currency from their use in TIME. Our movie reviewers borrowed cinema from the French--and played numerous variations on the theme with cinemactor, cinemactress, cinemoppet, cinemogul. The word newsmagazine was a TIME creation.

The magazine was the first to put the op in art, add the Roman numerals to World War II and to lead the way in popularizing scores of new words from G.I. to A-bomb and egghead. Richard Scammon's "unyoung, unpoor and unblack" description of the average American was quoted in TIME, and its reception encouraged him to co-author The Real Majority. We found ecdysiast, first minted by H.L. Mencken, a delightful way of describing Gypsy Rose Lee, and helped make it a part of the language. The title beatnik, originally bestowed on Bohemian writers in San Francisco, became a generic term in the pages of TIME. McCarthyism and Castroism first came into general use in the magazine, as did Kremlinologist, Sinologist and urbanologist.

As a matter of fact, so much that is new has appeared in the magazine over the years that one frequent visitor to the library in our London Bureau is a lady from the Oxford English Dictionary. Her task is to verify that TIME was the first user of many of the new words going into the latest edition.

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This week's cover story deals with the election of Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile, the first country ever to choose of its own elective will an avowed Marxist as its President. How this came about, and its likely effect on the rest of Latin America, was reported by David Lee, with the assistance of Kay Huff and Jerry Hannifin. The article itself was written by William Smith, researched by Genevieve Wilson and Sara Medina and edited by Ronald Kriss.

The Cover: Watercolor on colored paper by Bob Peak.

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