Johnson

MANY people can recite verbatim the television jingles of their youth. For today's American twenty- and thirty-somethings, the prize among these was the opening rap to Will Smith's sitcom "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". Yes: Will Smith, now the most valuable man in Hollywood, once specialised in harmless rap for preteens and teenagers. But it seems that even the most beloved of lyrics can't weather translation with grace. Earlier this week, a group of musicians put Mr Smith's lyrics through Google Translate. They changed his words from English to 64 of the service's languages and back to English.

FREDDIE DEBOER, a graduate student and blogger, has just summed up his class project examining the use of singular they. It will be hard going for most readers, using as it does terms like "anaphor" and "c-command" that aren't part of ordinary school and university grammar-teaching. After his technical analysis of the few cases where singular they is allowed (as in "every student aced their project"), he sums up for the lay reader:

Using "their" for singular antecedents is one that I think people need to just give up on. As I've argued, it only occurs in a very limited set of circumstances, and those circumstances [are very] unlikely to produce confusion about what is meant.

IN THE past two years, the BBC published two emotionally identical pieces on the annoyance that American English causes many an English English ear.  The Beeb published a much better piece on Britishisms in American English last year, too, but it turns out that the writer still over-egged the annoyance of one American commentator in order to gin up controversy. I was beginning to worry that the mutual transatlantic "nyah-nyah" was just too much fun for anyone to come round to writing something sensible.

So thank goodness for "Thank America for saving our language" by Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times. The headline, too, is over-egged in the opposite direction.

JOHN BRENNAN has been nominated by Barack Obama to run the CIA. Many of the early articles about the nomination, and older ones about Mr Brennan's career, refer to him as a "spook". This, of course, is jargon for a "spy". But I suspect it's entirely journalistic jargon: while hacks use the term with a sort of knowing tone ("we're all habitués of the spook business here"), I imagine that spooks do not, in fact, call themselves spooks. (Professional spies, please feel free to let us know in the comments.)

One of the reasons is the nature of insider language itself. It's designed to be different from what outsiders use.

FOR AMERICANS thinking about learning a language—and to lesser extent, for Europeans and Asians—the name Rosetta Stone may come to mind. In America in particular, the bright-yellow brand is, if not quite ubiquitous, to be found wherever the internationally-minded are: railway stations, airports, the ad pages of newspapers and magazines.  This week, I wrote about the business of language learning, also looking at Berlitz, for the print edition.

As a language writer, I’m often asked "Should I get Rosetta Stone?" For years, I was sceptical. In 2005, I reviewed an earlier version of the software, and came away partly impressed and partly frustrated. The interface was clever, and I truly seemed to be learning my test language with little conscious effort. But before long, I found what I thought was a near-fatal flaw: that Rosetta Stone barely differed at all between languages.

Arabic and Swedish pose very different challenges to the learner. One example: an early Rosetta Stone lesson teaches the difference between "he walks" (singular) and "they walk" (plural). But the Arabic version I looked at would occasionally show a man and a woman with the word yamshiaan, "they [two] walk." The dual is distinctive to Arabic and a few other languages. But Rosetta Stone did not single out and teach the dual separately. The learner was just supposed to figure out that when there were two people, the ending would change from –oon to –aan. The software should have singled it out for explicit practice.

Fortunately, Rosetta Stone agreed. Between Version 2 (which I had tested) and Version 3, customisation was added for each language. The peculiar difficulties of each language would get more focus, even while the basic lessons stayed the same.

So what does today’s top-end version, Version 4 TOTALe, look like? I spent several months with the software, working on Mandarin. (I tested Mandarin using Pinyin romanisation only. The software lets you learn with Chinese characters, but is not really designed to teach this unique and difficult system. Rosetta Stone focuses on getting you to speak.) The short verdict, after many hours spent: though it still has shortcomings, Rosetta Stone has come a long way, and I think it is a genuinely useful tool for language-learning.

THE WORLD ended today. (I'm writing this before the end of the workday, so I could be wrong.) If it did end: congratulations on surviving! What language do you speak? What about your comrades? Are there any traces of written language left? If you're still speaking and reading standard English, give it some time. The futurists think you or your children will be using language differently soon enough.

For instance, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, had some ideas of what English might look like in a few hundred years. The last of the novel's six stories takes place in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, "after the Fall". The chapter begins:

TWO WEEKS AGO, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report on a poultry plant accident that occurred in Arkansas in June 2011. Chlorine gas, an irritant, was released when chemicals were improperly mixed, and over 150 workers were hospitalised. When interviewed, the employee who caused the accident, a monolingual Spanish-speaker, noted that the safety instructions were written in English, a language he could not read. In fact, 68% of the workers at the plant spoke Spanish as a first language. 12% spoke Marshallese, an Austronesian language spoken on the Marshall Islands. Just 17% of the plant's workers used English as their native language.