More, more, more

It has been wonderful watching people grow the English language recently.

What was that? You don't like the verb "grow" being used with a direct object, unless we're talking about fruit, vegetables or beards? Well, I've got bad news for you: it's too late.

People now commonly talk about "growing a company" or "growing the economy" meaning to make it grow. There's even a company near Atlanta, Georgia, called "Grow a Company ". All very American I know, but I regard that as good, not bad, as many people seem to.

The Olympic Games also gave us some new "turns of grammar" in the form of verbs that used to be nouns only. For example, "to medal" doesn't mean to interfere in something that has nothing to do with you - that's spelled "meddle". Instead, it means to win a medal. And "to podium" means to get a place on the winner's podium, which makes it a synonym for "to medal".

Of course, the language purists and pedants ("P&Ps") hate this sort of language change. They want to decide which words are good and which are bad - not only in English, but also in German.

Well, I've got bad news for the P&Ps, too. The world isn't taking any notice of you. It's a competitive market out there, and the words people like are the ones they will use - not the ones the experts approve of. How wonderfully democratic!

I've also learned two new business words recently as a result of the credit crunch (another term we didn't use 18 months ago). First, there's "haircut", which I talked about last week . Second, there's "conservatorship". This is the new legal status of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two giant US mortgage companies.

The companies have been taken over by the US government and are no longer being run in the interests of private shareholders. We used to call that "nationalization". If we now want to call it conservatorship, that's fine with me.

What a wonderful language English is. It's growing, and we're growing it.