A wit once described an applied linguist as someone with a degree inlinguistics who was unable to get a job in a linguistics department.More seriously, looking back at the term ‘applied linguistics’, it firstemerged as an attempt to provide a theoretical basis for the activitiesof language teaching (witness Pit Corder’s book on the subject from1973). Later, it became an umbrella term for a variety of disciplineswhich focus on language issues in such fields as law, speechpathology, language planning, and forensic science. In the meantime,language teaching has evolved its own theoretical foundations, and these include secondlanguage acquisition, teacher cognition, pedagogical grammar, and so on, and there is adeclining interest in viewing ‘applied linguistics’ as having any relevance to languageteaching. Some years ago, many graduate programs in language teaching were labelled asprograms in applied linguistics. Today they are generally called programs in TESOL. Manyspecialists in language teaching, such as myself, don’t call themselves ‘applied linguists’. Weare what we are – specialists in language teaching, and we don’t see that adding the label‘applied linguistics’ to our field adds any further understanding to what we do.Where those in other disciplines find the label ‘applied linguistics’ of use to them, isof course, something they need to decide for themselves