Johnson

GIVEN that both I and my colleague R.L.G. have established firmly and more than once that we are not fuddy-duddies about people's incorrigible tendency to modify words and invent new ones, you'd think it no surprise to me that they have just as much of a penchant for reinventing idioms.

And yet I was surprised to learn (via Corinne McKay, a translator) that there are people who think it's perfectly okay to write "free reign" instead of "free rein", and, via the Guardian's David Marsh, that no less an authority than the Guardian style guide advocates "all mouth and trousers" over "all mouth and no trousers".

THERE'S a predictable kerfuffle over the news that America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is looking for people to translate wiretaps into English from, among other languages, Ebonics.

The real controversy doesn't seem to be about the DEA's quite sensible recognition that it has a problem understanding certain groups of people on the phone. (One of the other languages listed in the DEA's request for bids is Jamaican patois.) It's about what they call it. "Ebonics" has been a loaded word ever since the school board in Oakland, California decreed in 1996 that black students should be taught partly in Ebonics because that was what they spoke at home.

IT'S AUGUST, and time to reheat an old story, as most sensible journalists are on holiday (as I will be next week).  Today the New York Times reports a trend in families seeking bilingual nannies.  They reported on this same trend in 2006, with specific reference to Chinese nannies.

Parents think kids get a benefit from bilingualism, and they're probably right. But this article does mention some of the costs I hadn't seen mentioned before: word retrieval is said by Ellen Bialystock, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, to be milliseconds slower in bilingual kids than in monolingual ones.

TOM SCOTT notes that "the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content." He supplies some rather useful cautionary flags, like "Warning: to ensure future interviews with the subject, important questions were not asked."  Mark Liberman says scientific papers should come with similar labels, like

WARNING: This article contains conclusions about human subgroups drawn from small differences between small and unrepresentative samples.

VUVUZELA, overleveraged, quantitative easing, staycation, bargainous, social media, defriend, tweetup, bromance, buzzkill, cheeseball, chillax, frenemy, interweb and wardrobe malfunction. According to Reuters, these are among the words welcomed into the Oxford Dictionary of English in its latest edition. According to a certain view, their "in the dictionary" status makes them now "real words". I don't share that view (the set of legitimate words is bigger than any dictionary, and anyway which dictionary and why?)  But I'm not some accept-it-all softie, either, and I have to say I think a few of these are odd additions.

AN ENDEARING story from Brazil: the state of Rio de Janeiro is setting up a hotline for those insecure about their grammar. Call in and find whether you need the future subjunctive (Portuguese is unusual in having one), or where to put your accents (some homophones are distinguished only by one, like da, "from the" and dá, "give"). 

Brazilians are a bit touchy about their language use. Brazilian Portuguese differs quite a bit from its Portuguese parent. Brazilians don't use one of the three forms for "you" (tu, the most informal in Portugal) much outside the south.

VIA Stan Carey's Sentence First we learn that Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has long been interested (some might use a stronger word) in the periodic attempts to institute gender-neutral pronouns in English, for those cases where "he or she" feels cumbersome but "they" is numerically inaccurate.

You might have heard of pronouns like "ze" and "zer" created for the purpose of discussing transgender and genderqueer identity.