Over the past few decades, some of the most fraught issues in the English language, for educated people trying to do right by their mother tongue, have involved inclusive, or nonsexist, language. A number of traditional standard grammar rules seem to have been designed to put women down.

Is it proper to say, "Each student must do his own work"? Back in the days when grammar was taught in schools, that was the standard that was taught. But with women accounting for half or more of the students at a lot of institutions, the idea that the statistically "average" student was male has lost credibility.

Similarly, when enough women make it into the United States Senate that the prospect of a committee chaired by a woman is no longer just theoretical, is she a chairman, a chairwoman, or just a chair? The urge to brevity is pushing the language toward "chair," but more so, it seems, in the case of a woman than of a man. Thus we end up with Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, described variously as the chairman, chairwoman, or chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, but Alan Greenspan is fairly consistently identified as "Fed chairman."

This is the sort of thing that has prompted a reader query, "Are there languages without genders?"

Well, come to find out, there are. The Bengali language, for instance, has no genders. But before we go there, I'd like to note that a useful aspect of gender in language is that it gives an easy, convenient way to sort pronouns, which can be useful, space-saving placeholders.

Journalists are always in the market for synonyms and alternatives to keep from repeating the same words over and over. This sometimes puts them on the awkward path of what usage guru H. M. Fowler called "elegant variation." During my high school years in South Carolina, every time the local paper ran a story about the city's recreation director, a Northern transplant of Italian descent, he would invariably be referred to at some point about six or seven paragraphs in as "the Philadelphia native." His name was longer than "Smith" or "Jones," but it wasn't as long as "Philadelphia."

This is where pronouns come in handy – think of all the space you save once you've introduced Senator Collins with her full title and committee name, and then can refer to her simply as "she." Plural pronouns help, too. If you were describing the White House responding to a request from a Senate panel, for instance, you should refer to the administration as an "it" and the senators as "they" and not have to dream up six different variations on "committee." (Or you can refer to the "president's aides" as "they" and let the panel be the "it"; it doesn't matter but you have to set it up right.)

This convenience of the easily distinguishable pronoun may partially explain the use of feminine pronouns to refer to ships or storms. Among an all-male crew, "she" would obviously not refer to any of the guys.

But gender isn't just about sex and all that "chairperson" stuff. "Gender" really does mean "kind" or "sort," and refers ultimately to the ways people classify people and things. We borrow the word's French cousin, "genre," to refer to kinds of painting, or literary classifications: murder mysteries are a "genre" of fiction. A great many languages do classify nouns according to sex, but there are other ways of ordering the universe.

Some languages divide the world into animate and inanimate nouns, rational and nonrational beings, humans and nonhumans, male and others, or male human and others. Sometimes the distinctions are quite subtle. The Algonquian languages divide nouns into "animate" and "inanimate" – and they consider raspberries to be animate and strawberries inanimate. Go figure.

The Aboriginal languages of Australia are well known, in linguistic circles at least, for having four classes: men and animate things; women, fire, and dangerous things; edible fruits and vegetables; and miscellaneous things. Political guru George Lakoff, who focuses on how people's political thinking, in particular, grows out of the metaphors they embrace, picked up on this second gender and wrote a book about it, called "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."

This gets us to how "airplane" became a vegetable. In the Aboriginal language of Gurr-goni, spoken in northern Australia, there is a special gender for "edible vegetables," according to linguist Guy Deutscher in his book "The Unfolding of Language." Other plants were eventually included in this "edible" gender, he speculates, as were wooden objects, such as canoes, the Aboriginals' main means of transport.

When Gurr-goni borrowed the English word "airplane" into their language, as "erriplen," they conceived of it as a sort of flying canoe, and assigned it to the vegetable gender.

And that is how an airplane became a vegetable.

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

A few days ago, when hurricane Rita was just starting out as a tropical storm, a TV weather person was heard to describe it as "just shy of a hurricane."

Shy? Come again? For a storm with winds that subsequently picked up to 175 miles an hour, is "shy" really the right word?

Well, OK, maybe, yes. "Shy" in the sense that means "short."

(The storm season, however, has already gone on far too long. The National Weather Service is running out of names, and after "Wilma," the plan is to go to Greek letters to identify storms here.)

The English language is full of short little words we use all the time. We may marvel at the range and richness of the vocabulary of English – all those words imported from Norman French like silks and brocades – but it's the helpful monosyllables that we use all the time that really make the language what it is.

It often happens that little words like "shy," left lying around the house of common speech, get picked up for whole new uses – like those sturdy pink rubber bands that come home wrapped around the broccoli from the grocery store and end up holding tax papers together until we can get them to the accountant's office.

That's what seems to have happened with "shy." It's an ancient English word, going back to the Middle Ages, and it's rooted in the concept of a sort of timid-mindedness. Of the definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest meaning still current is "easily frightened away, difficult of approach owing to timidity, caution, or distrust," a sense that goes back to 1600. "Shyness" became the term use to describe those "difficult of approach" in social situations.

Note how it's shifted from applying to observable phenomena ("That horse is too shy to let me get near him; he bolts to the other side of the ring every time I try") to describing a subjective experience, namely, a state of social discomfort. ("I'm just too shy to really enjoy myself at big parties.")

Then there's the shyness of distrust or wariness – a reserve rooted not in lack of self-confidence or social grace but (perhaps well-founded) concern about another's motives or integrity.

But then there's the "shy" that is "lacking, just short of," which Oxford lists as an Americanism derived from betting slang, used to refer to one who has less at stake in a game than the rules call for. The usage has since been extended to other contexts, such as military rank. Oxford cites Stephen Crane's use of the term in "The Little Regiment," a short story: "None … knew how an orderly sergeant ranked, but then it was understood to be somewhere just shy of a major-general's stars."

The underlying metaphor here may be a holding back, a figurative hesitation to approach the full amount, the full rank. Whatever its background, this usage shows up in a number of idioms, including "a few bricks shy of a load." Someone who is described this way may also be said to be "not playing with a full deck." There's a whole canon of such insults out on the Web, known as "fulldeckerisms."

It may be quite a stretch for "shy" from its original sense of skittishness to its latter-day colloquial sense of falling short. Those pink rubber bands sometimes make quite a stretch, too. But calling a major tropical storm "shy" in any sense of the word was, well, a bit shy of a load.

The number of Gulf Coast residents displaced by hurricane Katrina is being estimated at around a million. Their claim on our hearts is immense. As we follow their progress from emergency shelters to temporary quarters to longer-term – dare we say permanent? – new housing, we are reminded just how fraught the terminology for describing people in motion can be.

Are they "refugees"?

Hundreds of news organizations seem to think so. A search of Google News has just brought up 5,400 hits for the phrase "Katrina refugees."

But not so fast, says the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "It is racist to call American citizens refugees," he pronounced on a visit to the Houston Astrodome.

President Bush agrees with him, for once, on this. "The people we're talking about are not refugees," he said. "They are Americans and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens."

"Evacuees" is the term many, but not all, news organizations are turning to; my Google News search turned up 6,820 hits for "Katrina evacuees." The National Association of Black Journalists has called on news organizations to avoid using "refugees," and several news organizations have banned the term.

For sticklers who want to save "refugee" to apply to those who have crossed an international border, there's the euphonious term "internally displaced persons." The president and Mr. Jackson may wish to modify this to "internally displaced Americans," however. And it should be noted that it's usually war or human rights violations that put the "D" in IDPs.

The real reason that "refugees" doesn't sit well with many people, particularly African-Americans, though, seems to be that "refugees" seems to equal "victims." They are the people they see on television, suffering in places like the camps of Sudan.

Some pundits and language mavens have been objecting to these objections. "A refugee is one who takes refuge," William Safire observed in his "On Language" column – before he decided he'd refer to those affected by Katrina as "flood victims." But that might be too simplistic. Words soak up connotations the way fabrics pick up odors. A term like "refugee" has an emotional edge – which is why some people want to ban the word and also why some absolutely want to use it.

For some whose historical frame of reference reaches further back in time than the African crises of more recent years, "refugee" might have more positive connotations.

During the last century, refugees were often political activists making trouble for bad leaders, or at the very least making a personally heroic leap to a new life in a new country. Think of the late film director Billy Wilder, for instance. And the United States has had two secretaries of State who came to this country as young "refugees" – Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright.

Another point: If "refugee" is taken as a pejorative term because it seems to deny someone's full rights as a citizen, no wonder some object. But if it is seen as pejorative because it suggests "someone who is not a US citizen," that is, a foreigner, what does that say about Americans' nationalism, or ethnocentricity? Is that not a form of racism, or to use a more apt term not so often used in the US, xenophobia?

And while I'm on my soapbox: Was anyone else a little concerned to hear the president, in his Aug. 31 speech to the country, keep using the term "citizens" in contexts where "people" or "men and women," or even "folks," would have done the job?

We're assisting local officials in New Orleans in evacuating any remaining citizens from the affected area. I want to thank the state of Texas, and particularly Harris County and the city of Houston and officials with the Houston Astrodome, for providing shelter to those citizens who found refuge in the Super Dome in Louisiana.

I can't believe the crews of the rescue helicopters plucking people from rooftops would have stopped to check for passports first.

One of the pleasures of being in London for a few days, as I was over the Labor Day weekend, is getting to experience British newspapers directly, in the flesh (in the pulp?) as it were.

But as I sat in seat 38G of my plane on the tarmac at Heathrow, awaiting departure for the return flight, with my copy of The Guardian open in front of me, and extending into the personal air rights associated with seat 38F as well as the aisle beside me, I stumbled over a headline. I had to read it at least four times before I got it:

New academy schools fuel education row

My eye caught "fuel education," which sounded as if it could be a program of tips on how to get better mileage from gasoline. And then I read it as "schools fuel," which made me think maybe I'd stumbled onto a story about classroom buildings being shifted from coal to electric heat.

Then I focused on "academy schools," but I read "schools" as a verb, as it would be used in a (headline) sentence such as, for instance, "Academy schools children from all over city." But that's not what was going on there. It finally occurred to me that "academy" was modifying "schools," which was being used as a noun. "Academy schools" were meant to be a sort of British answer to American-style "charter schools" – publicly funded institutions outside the usual curriculum and management style, seen as an alternative to traditional state schools deemed to have failed one way or another.

I'm not sure why such a school can't be called simply an academy. "Academy schools" sounds a bit redundant. I suppose, though, that given the growing presence of home schooling, or "homeschooling," as its advocates prefer, it may not be totally absurd to say "school schooling." After all, we've learned to say things like "land line" and "onshore oil" and even "print publication."

In any case, this process of elimination left "fuel" standing as the lone candidate for the predicate verb of the sentence, and I finally made sense of the headline. It was trying to communicate the idea that these "charter schools" are causing a stir among educators.

That it took so long for me to get it in the first place was maybe my fault. But I might not have been reading the headline from right to left in the first place except that my eye had followed my right arm out into the aisle of the plane as I opened the paper up fully to be able to take it all in.

At one point, as we were about to depart, one of the flight attendant asked me to haul my sail in because it was interfering with the prevailing winds within the cabin.

No, I just made that up.

But they don't call them "broadsheets" for nothing. There's something about a paper like The Guardian that discourages furtive reading.

A word on the last word of this confusing headline: "Row" in this sense has nothing to do with taking your boat gently down the stream. This "row" rhymes with "how now" and is a staple of British headline writing: It covers, with admirable succinctness and a dash of informality, concepts otherwise expressed by Latinate polysyllables: controversy, disagreement, contention, debate, dispute.

Except for that "w" stretched open like a salesman's sample case, it's a short word, only three letters. It's even shorter than one of my favorites, "flap." And of course all these describe events or phenomena that are the very stuff of politics and journalism: Newspapers need such words the way tailors need cloth.

All these short words – bid, blast, cut, fuel, hit, score, spark, spur, strike, surge, and the rest, as well as our friend "row" – have the advantage of conciseness, beloved of headline writers. Because English doesn't go in much for inflections – special add-ons to signal that a word is a dative plural noun, or a feminine singular adjective – there aren't extra endings to have to be squeezed into a skinny column. And all these words work as either verbs or nouns. And piled up in front of other nouns, they can be pressed into service as adjectives.

In this subhead in an energy publication, for instance, "Power price surges spark row," every single word can easily be used as either a noun or a verb.

Most of the time, these work. But flexibility can sometimes lead to ambiguity, as the meaning seems to shift as you read, as happened to me on the tarmac with my newspaper.

On the other hand, once you get the hang of it, you can make up your own, and then invent stories to run under them. One can imagine an article on the controversy surrounding a cap on public spending in a community waterlogged after a major flood that everyone is already torn up about (for example): "Fiscal freeze fans flames of flood flap."

Can you come up with your own?

A woman on the radio the other day – a mother keeping vigil with Cindy Sheehan, or opposing those keeping vigil, or supporting our troops while no longer supporting the war, or whatever – had made a comment about "supporting our boys and women" in Iraq.

It was one of those sound bites that enter into consciousness with a distinct clunk. It's a clunk that signals, "This little sensory impression is going directly into long-term memory; it may be a while before you understand it completely, but someday it will be important."

(At least that's the way my thought processes seem to work – yours too, maybe?)

Our boys and women? Hunh?

This is not the war your father fought in, I tell myself.

There was a little hesitation in the woman's voice before she said "women," as if she realized it was going to be awkward to couple the words that way, but even more awkward to do anything else.

It was one of those moments that crystallize a social change – women are playing a bigger role in the war in Iraq than in any other previous war – while also epitomizing how our language has so far adapted only imperfectly to the new social-military reality. It also shows how hard it can be to balance gender terms evenly.

"Boys" are, literally, male children. "Girls" are female children. (Strange but true, however: Around 1290, "girls" referred to children of either sex.)

Nowadays, "boys" and "girls" can also serve as informal designations for single-sex groups with upper age limits that range, shall we say, from flexible to nonexistent. Cf. "The Sunshine Boys," or "The Golden Girls."

But link the two – "boys and girls" – and you're immediately back among the 10-and-under crowd. (After all, aren't those in their second decade "young adults" nowadays, at least in the bookstores?)

To call our warriors "our boys" enfolds them in a blanket of tenderness and lets us imagine war to be some kind of football game. For the woman on the radio to have referred to troops in Iraq as "our boys and girls," however, would have been laughable, in a context where laughter wasn't called for.

"Our men and women" would have been a perfectly suitable locution. But "our sons and daughters" is probably the phrase she was groping for. It has the same gender equivalence as "men and women," with much more emotive richness, and not a whiff of generic HR-speak. It suggests a kind of parental tenderness without denying the adulthood of the individual troops.

Indeed this is the phrase that has been much used. A columnist in California wrote not long ago,

The commander in chief placed our sons and daughters in the midst of another country's civil war because he lacks an understanding of history, diplomacy and other skills possessed by qualified statesmen.

Equally impassioned on the other side of the debate, a columnist in Springfield, Mo., wrote,

I do not believe that you can support our troops and not support our president or the war in Iraq. By not supporting the war on terror, we are allowing our sons and daughters who have given the ultimate sacrifice to have died in vain.

But what if we want to be a little more informal – which is part of what the "our boys" locution accomplishes? "Our guys" would do, and, in the plural, "guys" is de facto a unisex term nowadays. But note that there's no real female equivalent, in American English at least, for the singular "guy." But speakers and writers like the ones quoted above presumably want to be explicitly inclusive of women in the armed services. 

There are plenty of colloquialisms for "female person": They start with terms like "chick" and go on through terms you aren't going to read in this space. What they have in common is that they define women as "the other," in a way that terms like "guy" or "bloke" do not define men. When Simone de Beauvoir called her book about women "The Second Sex," people knew what she meant.

There's "gal," which isn't to everyone's taste. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a "vulgar or dial. pronunciation of 'girl.'" (The Compact Oxford is somewhat more forgiving, defining it as an informal, chiefly North American term for "girl or young woman." In practice, "gal" has a rather flexible upward age limit; see "Golden Girls," above.) "Gal Friday," or " girl Friday," has worked its way into the language as a takeoff on "Man Friday," itself a phrase of dubious political correctness. Nowadays "his girl Friday" may well be the executive vice president for strategy and human resources. But why was it ever OK for the counterpart of "man" to be "gal," anyway?