Visiting Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace has long been on my list of "Things to Do in New York City Someday When I Have a Little Free Time Between Appointments." A few weeks ago, I decided, "Someday is now."

TR has long been a hero of mine. I came away from my visit with a new understanding of the sources of his ethic of public service (including his Quaker grandmother). I gained a new appreciation for the way he subordinated his ego and general exuberance to the cause of peace in helping end the Russo-Japanese war. Even if he hadn't been president of the United States, his literary output alone (three dozen books, including "The Naval War of 1812," still regarded as authoritative, and still in print) would have qualified him as the original Verbal Energizer Bunny.

But TR is coming up here right now because of something I read in one of the galleries in the house, which is run by the National Park Service, reporting that the young Theodore and his three siblings were "home-schooled" because of illness.

The eye noted this; the mind took a few days to work on it. Then the penny dropped: People have been educating their children at home for centuries, but "home-schooling" has a contemporary political edge, and it doesn't fit the Roosevelts.

Home-schooling is an act against "the establishment," or at least apart from it. The Roosevelts couldn't be against "the establishment"; they were the people who established the establishment.

It would have been truer to their times to say the young Roosevelts were "tutored at home." Ah, but "tutoring" nowadays brings to mind extra help given students who aren't quite "getting it" in their regular classes. Hitherto, parents have had to pay for much of this extra help themselves, sometimes twice, out of pocket for their own kids, through taxes for other people's, as part of government programs for poorer children. The No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, provides for tutoring on the public dime for pupils whose schools do appear likely to leave them behind.

Some time between the Roosevelts' childhood and, let's say, Bart Simpson's, "tutoring" was the way children were educated if they worked in Hollywood or were in a traveling circus; both contexts gave the term considerable panache.

Now that tutors are as common as light-up sneakers, I fear we'll start calling them something else. The extra help given Reginald Dimbulb Megabux IV to get him through Algebra II will be called "academic performance enhancement coaching," or some such foolishness.

Sometimes a term that sounds modern to our ears has centuries of history: "Fishers" sounds like a nice, contemporary nonsexist alternative to "fishermen," but it goes back to the King James Version of the Bible. "Disrespect," as a verb, has a "Hey, man, wassup?" kind of sound – but it actually goes back just about as far as "fishers," to 1614.

And sometimes we impose a modern term on an ancient – or folkloric – situation. Was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe a "single mother"? Or an unlicensed home-based day-care provider? An abusive foster parent? Or maybe just a radical-fringe advocate for alternative affordable housing?

We are all searching for peace in the Middle East. Men and women of goodwill everywhere must be: both peace in the larger region, and peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One first step may be to find a good metaphor.

I'm inclined to describe the merchandise currently in stock as afflicted with "metaphorosis." There's something not quite right with "the road map," as the White House proposal for the Middle East is known. As a term to refer to the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia, as interested bystanders trying to facilitate Middle East peace, "the quartet" has a sort of Old World charm, but not much "oomph."

The "road map for peace," as a bit of foreign-policy rhetoric, is rather like one of those M.C. Escher perspective drawings that make sense initially but not on closer inspection.

"A map" may sound like what we want, but a map is static. It clarifies relationships and suggests options, but doesn't really point the way. What we really need is not so much a map as a set of driving directions from Mapquest, or a TripTik from the automobile club, or maybe a flight plan, or even a railroad timetable.

The media keep wanting to put quotation marks around "road map" to signal they know it's not really a "map." (It may not be even a "policy.") And we all keep stumbling into silly locutions like "embracing the road map." But a metaphor has to work on two levels at once. "Embrace a road map, and it gets wrinkled," a colleague observed a few months ago. Exactly so. One can support an initiative, embrace a new idea, welcome a proposal as if it were a new family moving in next door. But embrace a map? Or "revive" it? (An image flits into thought of the president or secretary of State using a bicycle pump to inflate a map in the form of a giant air mattress.) Its "mapness," its "paperness" keeps getting in the way. And unfortunately the imagery that does continue the metaphor is of being torn up or at least folded up and stored away.

If the road map is flawed metaphor from the beginning, "the quartet" is almost too perfect. Think of chamber music at an embassy reception, with the strings providing tuneful audio cover as a diplomat from one country raises, over canapés, a new line of discussion on a sensitive topic with a diplomat from another country. ("Is this quartet the same one that played at the Congress of Vienna?" some slightly behind-the-curve readers may wonder.) Even more than diplomats, classical musicians strive for harmony. Their wardrobes have something in common – all those dark suits.

But think about the notion of a "quartet" involved in peace in the Middle East, and you have to think about who plays which part. The first violin, of course, is played by the United States – by Colin Powell, actually; the president is really not a violin kind of guy. The United Nations plays second fiddle, alas. The European Union is on the viola, and melancholy Russia is sawing away at the cello.

Once the parts are assigned, the question comes up, Are these musicians all on the same page? Or even in the same key? If we aren't sure the answer is a resounding yes, we might want to go shopping for another metaphor.

The right metaphor can all but literally move mountains. One of the best examples in recent history is the use leaders of the African-American civil rights movement made of the story of Moses leading the Children of Israel into the Promised Land. The Exodus story, familiar to blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, energized marchers, won over allies, and afforded bystanders evidence of the righteousness of the cause. The voices of bigotry, racism, and small-mindedness were drowned out by the thunder of Jehovah, "Let my people go!"

Without such a galvanizing metaphor, the peace process risks getting lost wandering in the Sinai Desert.

The White House needs to find its voice in Arabic.

This idea came to me the morning of President Bush's two interviews with the Arabic-language broadcasters Al Hurra, which is funded by the US government, and the independent Al Arabiyya. His goal was to communicate directly to the Arab world the abhorrence with which he and his administration view the evidence of abuse of Iraqi detainees at the hands of their American captors at Abu Ghraib prison, and the intention to take decisive corrective action. Brave man, I thought. It's remarkable that a president who doesn't talk to his own national press corps any more than he has to should submit to these interviews, however tightly controlled the circumstances.

But wait. After a brief moment in which I tried to imagine the president reading something in Arabic, transliterated into English, off a teleprompter, the penny dropped: He's not going to be speaking Arabic. He's going to be speaking English. He may be the leader of the free world, but his message is going to be at the mercy of the subtitlers and voice-over talent at the network studios. Yes, much can be conveyed by tone of voice, facial expression, and body language. Yes, there are Arabs who speak English. But how much better would it have been to speak to the Arabs in their own language? How much better to provide sound bites that can be spliced directly into Arabic-language news reports?

Now Mr. Bush has too much on his plate right now to sign up for a language course right now. But he – his whole administration – needs an authoritative voice in the Arabic language, a spokesman in the fullest sense, one who understands his thinking and can convey his message in Arabic. And I don’t mean translated into Arabic – but formulated in Arabic from the beginning.

There’s always a difference between the original and a translation, and in politics and diplomacy the difference often matters. When I was living in officially bilingual Canada, I was impressed by the seriousness with which many Anglo politicians took the challenge of addressing their Francophone compatriots in French.

Occasionally someone comes along who has a foot in both camps. Quebec Premier Jean Charest is so eerily bilingual – bicultural, actually – that in 1998 he was wooed away from his post as head of the federal Conservatives to take charge of the Quebec Liberal Party and help fight off the separatists. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, mentioned as a possible running mate for Democratic presidential contender John Kerry, has the potential for filling a similar bridging role in American politics: With his Anglo name, he slips in under the radar, but Latinos know he’s one of them. President Bush himself will probably never be as fluent in Spanish as Richardson, but the White House website isn’t full of “click here for Español” buttons for nothing.

But who could speak for the president in Arabic? If his trusted adviser Karen Hughes were fluent in Arabic, we would have heard about it by now. Ditto Condoleezza Rice and Jim Baker. (If Karl Rove speaks Arabic, I don't want to know about it.) The Arabic voice of the Bush White House should be someone trusted enough within the West Wing to be a fly on the wall, at least some of the time.

Sometimes in diplomacy access trumps fluency – the ambassador known to have the president’s ear can be more effective than the one who speaks the local lingo like a native. The search for the perfect spokesman or spokeswoman may involve tradeoffs. But is there somewhere a telegenic Arab-American, who maybe grew up speaking Arabic with Grandma, maybe someone with experience in the oil industry, a knowledgeable baseball fan? (No joke – Bush bonded with Condi Rice when they discovered they had baseball in common.)

The Sept. 11 attacks didn’t invalidate the US Constitution or repeal the laws of human nature; but as a great crisis often does, they have been a catalyst for a new level of communication in the long and fraught relationship between the West and the Islamic world. However the prisoner-abuse scandal plays out, however the war in Iraq unfolds, whatever direction the war on terrorism takes, these two worlds are going to have to learn to talk to each other better than they have done so far. (By Ruth Walker )

Do we have a problem with "problems" nowadays?

Have you noticed that people who used to have relatively straightforward "problems" now have "issues" instead? Are issues really problems – or questions? Or are we downgrading the language we use to describe the bad things that we have to deal with in our lives?

"Issues" has come into common parlance from the world of technology ("known issues with this program") and diplo-speak ("issues on the agenda for the foreign ministers' meeting") by way of the pychobabbling national kaffeeklatsch ("She still has some issues with her mother").

"Issues" can be fairly innocuous: "Some issues to consider if you're shopping for a digital camera." Here an "issue" is just "something to think about." The "issues" identified in the "readme" documents that come with new techno-gizmos are problems, though often relatively minor.

But imagine if, for instance, 19th-century armaments came with "readme" files (hand copied on vellum) identifying, say, "Known issues with the all-new 1812 model Peasant Blaster Cannon: Cannon is likely to blow up after 1,000 firings." A century later, civilization had progressed to a point where motorists had to worry about exploding gas tanks. Definitely a "problem," not just an issue.

A similar process of (sometimes undeserved) gentling seems to be at work in the realm of finance. Time was when financiers spoke of sharp economic downturn as "a panic," as in the Panic of 1893. The term "depression" was originally a euphemism, but the Great Depression of the 1930s was such a doozy that the term lost its euphemizing qualities. We've since started calling downturns "recessions," and now that the experts have (more or less) agreed on how to separate the real recessions from the fitful wannabes, the terminology is likely to remain stable for a while.

The Great Depression was the thunder that rumbled on after the lightning "crack" of the stock market crash of 1929, sometimes reverently capitalized: the Great Crash. It appeared for a time that this event might retire "crash" from the Wall Street vocabulary altogether. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 508 points on Oct. 19, 1987, the Monitor was notably sparing in its use of the straightforward term "crash." We had instead "slide," "plunge," "plummet," even "stir," and by the end of the week we were seeing great buying opportunities. More recently, though, with the event long past, we've more often referred to it as a "crash."

For a while, it looked as if "war" were going to go through a similar downgrading. The Korean War was often, is often, referred to as a "police action," which unfortunately suggests the men and women in blue directing traffic, rather than soldiers facing the ultimate sacrifice. Vietnam was often referred to, in the years when the memories were fresh, as a "conflict" – it was certainly that, but more – rather than a straight-ahead John Wayne, Audie Murphy kind of war. More recently, though, we've been more willing to speak matter-of-factly of "war," in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is a victory for plain-speaking. Francis Fukuyama may have declared "the end of history" but wars, alas, continue.

Now problems – or "issues" – are to journalism what dented fenders are to body shops, what shaggy manes are to hair salons, what grain is to flour mills: the raison d'être, the main event. And they turn out to have more of a connection to that 19th-century cannon than you might guess. "Problem" turns out to derive from Latin and Greek elements meaning "something thrown forward" – a sort of rhetorical projectile, thrown out for discussion, as we say. Problems are here to be solved.

If the Apollo 13 explosion had happened today, would Jim Lovell have radioed in, "Houston, we have an issue"? (By Ruth Walker)