"Psst!! Wanna buy some adjectives, cheap?

"Look, these babies are priced to move! OK, so the only documentation they’ve got is the Japanese version of the owner’s manual. And maybe they don’t have their original packaging. But don’t you want to think outside the box anyway?"

So it goes in the language bazaar. Goods that have been knocked around a bit in the marketplace of ideas end up taking on new meanings and losing their old ones.

They go through an awkward phase, like household items that are too outdated to move swiftly at a yard sale but not yet of interest to antiques dealers.

I recently suggested that careful writers should avoid using words whose meanings are in such flux that their dictionary definitions are at odds with what the popular mind thinks them to be. But a reader has challenged me on this:

"I do not agree that we should leave the word alone until it changes its meaning. This will only happen if people do not look the word up in the dictionary and if people do not use it properly and use it often….It is up to writers like you, whose columns and articles are read daily or weekly by many people, to carry the torch and show readers how language should be used. I hope you agree."

Well, how could I disagree with a reader who calls me a torchbearer?

Let's give this some more thought. Are there damaged goods that can be redeemed, restored? Some writers advocate dusting off, maybe refinishing, good old words that have fallen out of common use. For some years now I've been waging a low-level campaign to rescue "madam" from the red-light district and restore it as a full-service female equivalent of "sir." If we can't write "Dear sir or madam," some people will continue to address their business letters to "Gentlemen," which will continue to tick off the "ladies" generally tasked with opening such letters.

Some African-American writers and artists are working to "reclaim" the "n" word, which is a fight I will leave to them.

Actually there's another "n" word that made trouble a few years ago: niggardly. A city official in Washington, D. C., used the word, which means "miserly," in conversation. The term was misinterpreted as a racial slur, and the whole episode caused such an uproar that the official decided to resign, although he was reinstated.

It's worth noting that a quick Google News search this week for "niggardly" yielded only nine hits, two of them references to the Washington episode, including a column in the St. Petersburg Times; one in a university newspaper, and the other six all in non-US publications. "Niggardly" would seem to be damaged goods, at least for the time being, at least in the United States.

A notable instance of a worthy cause, but the wrong champion, seems to have surfaced in the controversy over Democratic presidential contender John Kerry's return from Vietnam six months early in 1969. Defending himself in an interview on the ABC News program "Good Morning America," he said, "I didn't write the rules of the United States Navy and the Marine Corps. I was told you're thrice wounded, you can go home."

I remember discovering the word "thrice" as a little kid and being disappointed not to get use it more often. It seemed like such a neat continuation of "once, twice…" "Thrice" does seem to be the Navy term; it has a nautical crispness, doesn't it, a tang of salt air? But I'm not sure it was the best choice of words for John (Man of the People) Kerry. (By Ruth Walker)

Last week I mused that past and future tenses of verbs seem to be evaporating from the language in favor of a "timeless now." This week I'd like to report on where tenses are going: They're attaching themselves to nouns.

Well, not exactly. The dictionary doesn't (yet) list past tense forms for nouns as it does for verbs. But how else can you think of a locution like "then-president" than as the "past" form of the noun "president"?

What focused my attention on this development was a sentence from a Monitor article: "In 1980, Egypt threatened war with Ethiopia after Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam opposed attempts by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to divert waters to the Sinai Desert."

The sentence originally referred to "the late President" Sadat and "then-President" Mariam. The logic of a "late," or more bluntly phrased, "dead" leader threatening a live one, however, was dubious indeed, and so the copy desk called for a change – ixnay "late," ixnay "then" as modifiers for the presidents. There's a clear time reference – 1980 – almost a quarter century in the past; surely readers know we make no guarantees that actors in the story are still in their present jobs? Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, and Mengistu Haile Mariam was forced to flee to Zimbabwe 10 years later.

But what if it's a more recent "then" player? And what if it's a Washington reference, and we're comparing the current Iraq war (not yet capitalized) with the Gulf War, which is how we referred to the then-war in Iraq when it was the now-war?

In the (current) Bush administration, we've got now-Vice President Dick Cheney, the then-secretary at Defense. We've got now-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we've got now-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is also former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (albeit under Gerald Ford) and then-President Bush, who is now the former President Bush, and whose eldest son, the then-future Governor Bush, has since become the current President Bush. If this were a political blog, I'd be tempted to observe that all this takes "déjà vu all over again" to a whole new level.

What has been, what has become

If you're still with me, take a few deep breaths, and let's think about another way nouns get into tense situations: "what has been" and "what has become."

For example: Senate majority leader Bill Frist, in an article about asbestos legislation is quoted by Reuters as saying, "It is time to fix what has become an embarrassingly inadequate system we have to compensate victims." Note that he didn't use a simple noun phrase, "our embarrassingly inadequate system." No, it's "what has become our embarrassingly inadequate system." The embarrassing inadequacy has been building for some time, one gathers, and now, boom! It's at the top of the agenda.

The same construction appeared in a whole other ball game when the St. Louis Post Dispatch described Jeff Luhnow of the Cardinals as "part of what has become a new wave" of managerial talent within Major League Baseball - "young men educated at elite institutions who are adept at commingling computers, statistical analysis, and a fresh look at evaluating players."

On the other side of the coin is "what has been." The Houston Chronicle, for instance, recently reported, "Wind hampered anglers hoping to take advantage of what has been improving crappie fishing."

A sports website reports, in its coverage of minor-league hockey, "Wilkes-Barre hosts Bridgeport in Game 4 of what has been a thrilling East Division semifinal so far."

If "what has become" refers to developments that materialize before our eyes, the way Star Trek characters do when they are beamed up, "what has been" seems to refer to what is here now but may disappear at any moment, like the Cheshire cat, leaving only a smile behind. (By
Ruth Walker)

A huge chunk of our past is disappearing. And so is a lot of our future, too, for that matter.

The first time this phenomenon really got my attention came recently when the morning guy on our local NPR station was giving the weather forecast for the coming week in the final seconds before the headlines at the top of the hour. This being New England, he had more discrete meteorological phenomena to get through in 13 seconds than some parts of the country will experience all spring. And so, rushing to wrap it up over the relentless crescendo of the "news music," he blurted out something along the lines of "Thursday it rains; Friday it clears up; and then possible snow showers Saturday."

Thursday it rains? Not, "Rain is predicted," not "it should rain," not even the concise but bold prediction, "it will rain." No. "Thursday it rains."

Welcome to the 24/7 news cycle. Who needs a future tense? After all, the guy said "Thursday."

For some time now, people have been using the progressive tense ("I am going") with a forward time element to indicate the future: I'm flying to Chicago tomorrow. But that's a future growing pretty clearly out of the present, and my own present at that. I presumably already have my ticket and know my flight time. That's a whole other thing than committing the New England weather to a command performance three or four days hence.

The disappearing past tense has a tale to tell, too. Most of us are so used to present-tense headlines on past-tense stories that we don’t give them any thought. "Man Walks on Moon" was the headline on the stories appearing the day after Neil Armstrong's lunar stroll. Back in East Podunk, "Mayor Fires Police Chief" would be the way the local paper heads the story that begins, "Mayor Blowhard, citing irreconcilable differences in philosophy of policing, fired Police Chief Charlie Short yesterday. […] The chief was spotted breaking a few windows as he headed out of town."

For those new to English, however, newspaper headlines are a language unto themselves. A couple of researchers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, identified as a characteristic of headlines "the suppression of spatial and particularly temporal markers." I couldn't have put it better myself.

Way back when, some newspapers occasionally used "imperative" headlines. In the example above, we might have ended up with "Fire Police Chief." Possibly these were understood as variations on the passive voice still common today ("Police Chief Fired"). But their potential for misinterpretation would seem to have been considerable. Imagine, for instance, to describe exuberant behavior by college students on break, a headline reading "Paint the Town Red," with a subhead, "And Then Set It Ablaze."

Another form of "timeless now" I've noticed is found in quotes from academics, who often show up in the media nowadays. Historians and biographers, in particular, often seem to live so immersed in their periods of study or in the lives of their subjects that they speak of them in the present tense. For them the past is less "another country" than an extremely familiar DVD on which they skip around at will. They say things like, "It's the early years of industrial America, and the railroads are just beginning to crowd out the canals," or "Lincoln goes to New York to give his famous Cooper Union speech, and it's a big deal for him, because he's not well known at all back East…" Once I started noticing this, I heard it surprisingly often.

Just this week, for instance. Intelligence chief George Tenet and 9/11 commissioner Tim Roemer, discussing contact with President Bush during August 2001, shifted, apparently unthinkingly, from the logical past tense to the timeless now, in an exchange that concluded with Mr. Tenet saying, "In this time period, I'm not talking to him."

What does all this mean? Changes in usage reflect changes in perception of time. We may be experiencing less a linear view of time and more of a web view. Or make that Web view. (By Ruth Walker)

The first thing I ever knew about London was that its bridge was falling down.

Soon after came word of the muffin man who lived in Drury Lane, and then the story of Dick Whittington. Dick, an actual historical figure, was a sort of proto-Horatio Alger, a poor English country boy who made good in the big city.

The literal turning point in his story came when he had hit a very low point and was about to give up in despair. But then on Highgate Hill, he heard the pealing of church bells, calling out to him, he felt: "Turn back, Dick Whittington, turn back! Thrice Lord Mayor of London!"

He did turn back, and to simplify the story greatly, things began to turn around for him, and the prophecy of the bells was fulfilled.

Now, is it because I know the story of Dick Whittington and the church bells that I hear a sort of ding-dong in the (self-rhyming) name of his city – if not the sound of St. Mary le Bow, then maybe Big Ben?

The music of words can be fascinating when you start to listen for it, and place names are particularly rich in associations. Sometimes the names may be better than the places. However well or badly reconstruction in Afghanistan is going, however, no country that includes such magical names as "Jalalabad" and "Kandahar" can be a lost cause. (I wish, though, that I could shake the feeling I hear a bomb going off in the middle of "Baluchistan" – Ba-LUUUCHHHH-i-stan).

When I was a child in southern California, beginning to place my little bits of knowledge of the world together in some kind of coherent pattern, I was intrigued by its Spanish names. To my Anglo ears they sounded exotic. I wasn't sure which had come first, or which trumped which. Does Imperial Highway beat El Camino Real (the king's highway)? It must have been like what white kids growing up in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s felt about the Motown Sound their black counterparts were producing and enjoying.

A high point was finding out that a fuller version of the Spanish name for Los Angeles was El Pueblo (later La Ciudad) de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles: The City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. Anglo towns seemed to be named after politicians, developers, or railroad barons. One didn't have to be Spanish or Catholic to perceive that "the Queen of the Angels" had a lot more panache than any of those. As fifth-graders we had a regular Spanish-language educational television program we watched, and we would repeat after the pretty teacher on the screen, a bunch of little gringos (gringuitos?) struggling to get the soft "d" and all those rolled "r's."

I've been back in California the past few days remembering all this, and finally realizing why it rather annoys me that Los Angeles is so commonly referred to as "L.A." What other city is so routinely denied the dignity of its full name? And for a rather easily swallowed set of initials at that. I remember hearing Susan Sontag describe how she had taken issue, shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, with someone who had referred to it simply as "T.M.I." We don't have time to use real words - Three Mile Island? she reproached him. Life is short, but it's not that short. (By Ruth Walker)

I thought – briefly – that maybe I'd gone a bit far the other week in championing the role of the unsung semicolon.

But then I saw a Reuters news photo, snapped just after the Madrid bombings March 11, showing a public-service ad posted in London's Victoria Underground station. The poster was intended to encourage travelers to keep an eye out for unattended bags and parcels that might conceal a bomb – not a new concern, alas, in Britain, which over the years has had much sad experience with IRA explosions.

But actually, what struck me most about the ad was something that wasn't there – a semicolon. Seriously. The semicolon has a part to play in Britain's national security, and the Metropolitan Police – or somebody – is not cooperating!

The white-on-black text of the ad is punchy and direct: "Who owns this bag? If you suspect it, report it." Note the rat-tat-tat-tat of the first four Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, followed by the nice balance of the two Latin-derived disyllables.

Then the text continues in the middle of the image in a black bubble, like a very somber cousin to the "thought bubbles" that float over the heads of comic-strip characters. "Don't touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999."

Officer, I want to report a comma splice on the Victoria Line: The ad needs a semicolon, or maybe even a period (a "full stop") after "Don't touch." Otherwise the "don't" applies to all the other verbs: checking, informing, or calling (999 being the British equivalent of 911 in the United States).

Don't be silly, some may counter; everybody knows what's meant. Besides, Londoners unclear on the concept could have seen Defense Minister Geoff Hoon on the other "tube" – BBC Television – to talk up public vigilance.

But does a message that makes sense only if you already know what it's supposed to mean count as communication? The Underground daily serves thousands of foreign visitors and immigrants whose grasp of English can be as tentative as a straphanger's footing during the morning rush. If I were charged with keeping the Tube safe, I would be especially loath to discourage any passenger from approaching any other passenger about a suspect bag.

I'm not the only one to raise this point. The Economist noted that the Tube ad "seemed oddly keen to encourage natural British reticence rather than vigilance," though conceding that it might have been "planted by punctuation zealots" to make a point.

Sept. 11, 2001, made us all New Yorkers. Since March 11, todos somos madrileños. I don't want us all to have to become Londoners. (By Ruth Walker)