Comment 6 for bug 784758

Nice you could track it down so quickly!..

I can see it is still in the recent versions (coreutils 8.5)

And yes indeed, I'm on fr_FR (or seems so, I don't have a LANGUAGE variable in env, but only LANG saying fr_FR)

$ env | grep -i lang
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
GDM_LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8

And just to be sure, if I do the opposite of your test above

$ env LANGUAGE=en_GB:en od --help | grep strings
  -S, --strings[=BYTES] output strings of at least BYTES graphic chars

... it becomes right!