Have you noticed that no one seems to do anything solo anymore?

Well, that may be an exaggeration – but not by much.

Books nowadays seem as likely to be written by teams of coauthors as by lone scribes. Organizations seem to have cofounders, rather than a single founder. Revisionist historians, I can imagine, will soon be writing about the Cofounding Fathers, or maybe Cofounding Parents, to give Abigail Adams and the other "ladies" of the American Revolution their due. In this intensely political moment of candidates and running mates and candidates' wives, we are reminded of flaky concepts of "co-presidents" in electoral seasons past.

Museum exhibitions have "co-curators." In the world of television and film, "coproducer" and "co-creator" are familiar terms. The latter sounds as if it could apply to whoever is in the conference room when the big brainstorm hits. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: "How many people in Hollywood does it take to make the light bulb come on?"

And my point here is? Keep an ear out for the "co" prefix, and you'll hear it everywhere. It's a sign of the way language changes in response to changing patterns of thought and activity.

The "co" prefix derives from the Latin "cum," meaning "with" or "together." It's long been established, with variations, in Latin-derived words like collaborate (to work or to labor together) or connect (from words meaning "to fasten together"). More recently it's been stuck rather awkwardly onto Anglo-Saxon terms, as in, "Over the weekend, I co-wrote a song with my boyfriend." This is the verbal equivalent of mixing stripes and checks: not an absolute no-no, but you've got to know what you're doing. And note, by the way, the insistence on the redundant "co-wrote," even with the "with my boyfriend." It's as if "co-writing" were materially different from "writing."

I have a professional interest in "co" words: As the copy desk chief of my newspaper, I have to pay attention to whether we hyphenate them, as with "co-creator," or close them up, as we say in the newsroom, as we do with "coauthor," for instance. We generally close them up. We've made some exceptions, such as for "co-workers": Closed up, "coworkers" sound like the people who ork the cows. And that is orksome indeed. But nowadays "co" coinages are coming so thick and fast that I'm not sure readers can keep up with them. I'm inclined to hyphenate them until they become more familiar.

We have co-parenting and even "co-principal investigator." My personal fave at this moment is "co-coordinator." Are we going to find out that what we should have had in the first place was an "ordinator"? Why does having "co-coordinators" sound as unnecessary as having more than one pair of hands on the steering wheel? It's enough to drive me – or maybe even all of us who coordinate people who care about such things – nuts, or should I say, co-conuts?

But all this may be a sign of the times, and not necessarily a bad sign. The dotcommers' bubble has long since burst, but their collaborative work styles live on. It makes me wish I'd invested big in whiteboards and dry-erase markers 20 years ago. The interest in pluralism, in diversity, both in the larger sense and the more earthbound sense in which human resources professionals use the term, is surely a factor in organizations' having "co-chairs," for instance.

Then there's the "go big or stay home" factor: All sorts of things once done on a local or regional scale are now seen as naturally requiring a national or even global scale, from hardware stores, restaurants, clothing retailers on through corporate accounting and aircraft manufacture. Read the closing credits carefully at the end of even a low-budget art-house flick and you'll see more international participation than the president's coalition of the willing. Everybody needs partners nowadays – or is that copartners?

Still, there's something to be said for the clarity of one individual's vision, articulated by a single voice, even one crying in the wilderness.

Can you imagine the prophet Jeremiah with a coauthor: "Dunno, Jer, don't you think you're coming down awfully hard? The focus groups tell us that our target demographic finds the really strong language sort of…I dunno...disempowering??

No voice crying in the wilderness here, boss.

I've been paging through a new book by Alex Frankel, "Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words Into Big Business." It's introduced me to the world of naming consultants, the people who get paid to help corporations come up with just the right monikers for themselves and their hot new products.

Frankel, a San Francisco journalist who has filled in for William Safire in the "On Language" slot of The New York Times Magazine, ran his own naming business, Quiddity, for a time before the dotcom bubble burst. (Of that period he writes, "The whole Internet fever lived and breathed, rollicked along like a parade that celebrated the triumph of the idea over the tangible, grounded-by-gravity thing. But in the end there was at least some vindication for objects.")

Much of the change in language is gradual and unintententional. "New words" are generally just old words mumbled or mangled so badly they get repackaged with a new meaning – the old French for "couvre le feu" (cover the fire) eventually became our English "curfew," for instance.

And so the idea of a corporation paying a collection of professional wordsmiths big bucks to mint a new piece of coinage is interesting. It's the appeal of intentionality over accident. It's also to some extent the continuing triumph of the idea over the thing, of words as things, as products.

A lover of language looks at a new coinage the way a fan of architecture will look at a new building: Is it aesthetically pleasing? Does it fit well on the site, into its surroundings? Does it do the job it's supposed to?

My favorite chapter in "Wordcraft" discusses the naming of BlackBerry, the handheld messaging device produced by the Canadian firm Research in Motion. "Blackberry" is an actual word; it was modified by "intercapping," the internal capitalization so common nowadays in corporate names. BlackBerry was a distinctive name that wouldn't confine the company to a narrow definition of the product. Because berries grow on vines, it suggested "networks," but in an accessible sort of way. And you can be sure that something called a "BlackBerry" is not going to come with a 200-page manual.

There are whole fields that seem to have done well over recent decades at coming up with energetic, effective new coinages, and other fields that have not.

Astronomy is one of the standout sciences – although most of its best new terms are not so much new coinages as concrete familiar terms given new meanings. "Black holes" may represent the gold standard of scientific coinage. They were at first called "totally gravitational collapsed objects" and defined as collapsed stars with incredibly strong gravitational pull. "No one could wrap his head around this term until someone rechristened the phenomena black holes – objects from which light could not escape," Frankel notes. "Popular astrophysics has never been the same."

And once the scientific concept was established in popular thought, it could be adapted for use as a metaphor in other contexts. You may have a teenage son whose room could be described as a "black hole," for instance.

Similarly, astronomy has given us "dark energy" and the "big bang." Astronomers use what they call standard candles to measure the distance of galaxies and other objects in space. All of these are adaptations rather than coinages from scratch.

Physics is another field where naming has been done with a sense of creativity and whimsy: quarks and neutrinos and leptons, for instance. The social sciences generally seem to be a disaster in terms of coinages: mostly polysyllabic and often redolent of euphemism. There's nary a bit of whimsy in sight.

The field of computers and personal electronics is a mixed bag. It's overloaded with geeky initialisms: ADSL, XML, etc. Of a movie we read, "Now out on VHS and DVD!" Why not simply, "Now out on tape and disc"?

A couple of my favorite recent new terms do come from computerland, though: "hot spots," and "FireWire" – the technology that allows superfast transfer of data. Both are short, snappy, concrete, and self-rhyming. "Hot spots" is a generic expression that has taken on a specific new meaning in the field of wireless computer networking. "FireWire" is even better, because it doesn't have other more general meanings. Who knew that at this late date, such a nifty practical term could be put together from off-the-shelf parts?

Ever since my first encounter with Chaucer in the eighth grade I've been thinking about the way the English language is changing. At what point, I wondered – how many centuries out – will familiar texts like the Declaration of Independence, say, become as challenging to future generations as "Aprill, with his shoures soote" was to me?

I've often wondered why those who don't understand the rules of grammar, alas, should be the ones who get to change them.

There – with that "alas," I've tipped my hand as a prescriptivist, a believer in the "should" and "must" and "ought" of language.

Sometimes, though, I try to mellow out and be an objective observer. It's a strain, believe me. It's natural that language should change. Some usages fall out of favor; new terms are coined to meet new needs. Let's imagine a Grammar Futures Exchange, in which shares in different words and usages are bought and sold on the basis of how useful people think they will be in the future.

The naked intransitive

Which sectors of the market is the smart money watching? Well, this analyst is bullish on what we might call the "naked intransitive": the verb form that is now seen as complete in itself, without any object or complement or other add-on – earlier practice notwithstanding. Thus we have "to cave," instead of "to cave in," for example: "The kids wanted to go out for pizza, and even though I'd planned to cook dinner, I just caved."

Here are a couple of examples that have crossed my desk in the past couple of weeks:

A reference to places where people are 'recreating' – beaches, malls, sporting events." (By the way, "recreating," as distinct from "re-creating," is what scholars call a "back-formation" – "a word actually formed from, but seeming to be the base of, another word." In this case, "recreation" was there first.)

"Lately, some other stocks have been outperforming." Outperforming what? Inquiring minds want to know.

The transposed gerund

The astute investor on the Exchange should also have a certain position in transposed gerund phrases: "problem solving" instead of "solving problems," or "fundraising" instead of "raising funds." On a recent radio program about post-traumatic stress in the military, I heard a talking head say that for members of the mostly male armed forces, "help seeking" is hard. Note the word order – "help seeking," not "seeking help." A Google search of the two phrases suggests that the latter is still vastly more common (by a factor of almost nine) but that the former has a secure toehold, especially in the medical and education fields. How long before "seeking help" begins to sound like Chaucer's "shoures soote"?

The morphed transitive

An official in Washington holding forth on education policy told National Public Radio the other day, "What's important is that young people graduate high school college-ready."

Well, if they want to graduate with honors, they might want to consider "graduating from high school," I sniffed. My fellow editors around the globe seem to concur: A Google News search brought up 539 instances of "graduate from high school," compared with 126 for "graduate high school."

But in my father's day, the "graduation" controversy was whether it was still necessary to say "be graduated from high school." Those who thought it was, however, did not have time on their side. In this view of things, the school graduates students – transitive verb, with "students" as object, not subject. The contemporary "correct" usage has "graduate" as an intransitive verb, with "students" as the subject. If the Washington official's usage catches on, though, "graduate" will become a transitive again, but this time with "students" as the subject and "high school" as the object. (See Fig. 1)

	Original transitive	Contemporary intransitive	Morphed transitive
Subject	School	Students	Students
Verb	Graduates	Graduate	Graduate
Object	Students		Schools
	Tom was graduated from Harvard in 1958.	Dick graduated from Harvard in 1976.	Harry will graduate Harvard in 2007, if he can pass English.

My moralistic side is bothered by this; the more detached observer notes which way the tide is running. If I thought there were money to be made on the Grammar Futures Exchange, I'd call my broker with "buy" orders for naked intransitives and transposed gerunds. I'd even – arrgghh! – go for a modest investment in the morphed transitive.

Have you ever noticed that some words sound like what they mean? I don't mean just the obvious onomatopoeia of snap, crackle, pop. Some language sounds seem to be connected with certain meanings. Notice how many upward-soaring words have a long "i" sound – fly, sky, high, spire. Or how many ditzy little words have the short "i" of, well, "ditzy" or "little": bits, kids, chips. Compare the sound of "potato chips" vs. "pork chops." Which one sounds like more substantial victuals?

But the sound that most strikes me is the short "u" – the "u" of "putt," that is, not "put." I find out the "putt" sound is known to phoneticians as an "open mid back unrounded" vowel. But let's just call it the blunt "u" for short. It's characteristic of English, and utterly absent, as far as I can tell, from any of our linguistic near neighbors, including German and Dutch.

What's so special about this blunt "u"? Well, it's a sound that comes into play to discuss some of the base realities of human life. The blunt "u" is the sound of dust and mud and stuff and junk, and scum and feeling crummy on a dull day.

It's the sound of bumbling and bungling, of being taken for a chump, of taking a drubbing, of getting dumped by your sweetie, of flubbing your lines or flunking a test, of frumpy attire, of muffing an opportunity, of getting punched in the nose, of slumming and slumping and stubbing your toe. It's fussing and "cussing," (to use the colloquial pronunciation, from which the "r" has completely disappeared.) And it's "plug ugly," too.

The "open mid back unrounded" vowel is the sound of thunder and drum rolls, but also of a dull thud in the next room, or a blunt rebuke.

In forms of personal address, it's "bub," or maybe "buster," or down South, "Bubba": "You'd better move your car, bub, or I'm gonna write you up a ticket." It's not quite the same as being announced by the butler, is it?

The blunt "u" sound isn't all bad news; it's the sound of "love," of fun in the sun with your buddies – or your chums. It's "hugs" and "money," but also "funny money," which rhymes so perfectly you know you'd better watch out.

Let's say the blunt "u" is very much grounded; not flashy, but solid. Even its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, an inverted "v," seems to have both feet on the ground. It gets the job done. But it sometimes has an image problem. Compare the Anglo-Saxon "chunk" and the French-derived "slice." Which would you rather serve to company?

The tension within the English language between workaday Anglo-Saxon and highfalutin French goes back to the Norman Conquest. In an e-mail exchange with me this week, Melinda Menzer, associate professor of English at Furman University in South Carolina, and author of a website on the Great Vowel Shift of around the year 1400, speculated that the Germanic roots of some of these words may reinforce the sense that the blunt "u" is a cruder sound.

The blunt "u" isn't confined to monosyllables, though. It's there in a number of Latin-derived polysyllables: repulsion, revulsion, repugnant, pugnacious.

And it even shows up in "pulchritude," which has to be on the list of Top 10 Words in English That Do Not Mean What They Sound as if They Would Mean.

The e-mails that arrived in response to an entry the other week about how to refer to "illegal immigrants" confirmed my hunch that this is a vexed topic.

The reader feedback made me realize that we don't have a very good word for "foreigners" either; that is, a word to do the work that "foreigner" used to do before it began to sound pejorative. We have ways to describe people in a given country with reference to their immigration status. We can call them "international visitors," in the lingo of the convention and tourism bureaus of the big cities. But a straight-ahead, nonjudgmental term for those who find themselves in a country other than their own doesn't come easily to hand.

"Foreigners" sounds like a word from my childhood, used to describe a kind of person that we Wonder Bread eaters in the heartland didn't know too many of. It suggests men who button their top shirt button even when they're not wearing a tie, and never put their knife down when they dine.

"Foreign" is, well, a strange word; it carries its silent "ig" concealed like a cold-war spy within. Indeed, a look at the etymology and history of the word suggests that its spelling has been getting more complicated over time. It has been acquiring extra letters since the Middle Ages. By the time we're able to vacation amid the orange gas clouds of Saturn, the word will probably be spelled "phoreigghhenne."

Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting, the founder of CNN, and also a generous benefactor of the United Nations, is famous for banning almost any use of the word "foreign" on his news networks. "Everybody kept it in mind," says a former employee. Though the stories of staffers being fined $50 to $250 for letting the seven-letter word slip by are probably "apocryphal," he adds, "'International'" got subbed in mindlessly."

This idiosyncrasy was key to Turner's "embrace the world" philosophy – we all live in one global media village. Exceptions were made only for such official titles as "foreign minister" or proper names as "the Council on Foreign Relations." But the people who work in such places are "international affairs experts," in the CNN lexicon. US military forces blitz into trouble spots to evacuate "nonnatives," or "Westerners," rather than foreigners. My source recalls that even the construction "foreign object" was suspect.

A search of the Factiva database – which indexes a vast range of publications around the world – shows what looks to me like relatively infrequent use of "foreigners," especially in some of the most influential American papers.

There are some glaring exceptions out there, though. The British network ITV actually has a show called "Dumb Foreigners," evidently a sort of "Candid Camera" of the global village. It caused a stir recently, not because anyone objected to calling other groups "foreign" or even "dumb," but because it showed the St. Andrew’s cross flag of Scotland as if to suggest Scots were “foreigners.” This gave grave offense in some quarters. "Do we Scots not pay income tax, national insurance etc. to Westminster?" one aggrieved Scot ranted online.

Curiously, though, "aliens" seems to be OK at CNN. I remember first meeting that word at the post office when I was a child. I saw posters reminding "resident aliens" to register every January. "Alien" has just had a little moment in the limelight because of this week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Alien Tort Statute case. Can you tell from its name that the law goes back to 1789 or what? It’s been downhill for "alien" since. Sigourney Weaver finished it off, and now the term has come to seem "more appropriate for visitors from Mars and other outer space locations," as a lawyer responding to my earlier entry noted.

Is "stranger" the word we're looking for? Some other languages seem to use this word – or rather their version of this word – as a relatively neutral term to refer to those who hail from across international borders. The Bible is full of admonitions from God to do right by "the stranger that is within thy gates."

But "stranger" carries too much baggage – has too much of an edge of "danger," with which, I'm just now noticing, it rhymes all too perfectly. "Strangers" are the people young children are told not to get into cars with. "Don't open your hood to strangers" is the slogan at the service departments of Honda car dealerships. Hmmm.

Another option here might be "exotics," but that sounds like a reference to tropical fish from the pet shop, or one of those insect-eating plants that the state ag department is afraid will run amok in the suburbs.

Seriously – the trouble with "foreigners" may be a politically correct squeamishness about identifying anyone as "other." Or our discomfort may reflect the way everyone’s horizons have been broadened. "Nothing human is alien to me," said the Roman playwright Terence. And the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And the African-American poet Maya Angelou. The time may come when this is everyone’s motto.