It’s time for language experts to take over the narrative on language journalism. Much of what’s written online about language today under the guise of journalism is driven by harried editors assigning stories on language to journalists and freelance writers based on stubborn, intractable and misinformed preconceptions about how language actually works. Common among them: There exist “correct” and “incorrect” forms of language use, with “correct” defined by the rules of grammatical usage for the formal register learned at whatever arbitrary dates the peever happened to be in school, which are then expected not only to stay immutable and permanent for all time, but to be enforced with a militant rigor;  Failure to comply with these “rules” is interpreted as a shocking lack of education and cultural sophistication, with a similar down-the-nose dismissal of unfamiliar or culturally suspect dialects, neologisms,…