I continue to learn from the questions my colleagues ask.

A simple question about whether to capitalize a phrase in a magazine article prompted me to think about the role of the media in holding governments and other powerful actors to account.

An e-mail arrived the other day from the editor of a magazine I've been working with: "You sure about this? 'National anthem' isn't capitalized'?"

Yes, I'm sure. At least I think I'm sure.

The context was a feature article previewing an equestrian competition to be held in one of the communities the magazine covers. An informational sidebar detailing the timeline of events was included, and "National Anthem" was an item on the program.

Using the "track changes" feature of Microsoft Word, the 21st-century equivalent of the blue pencil of yore, I had "taken down" the "N" and "A," as editors say. (It's not as violent as it sounds.)

But the editor's query sent me to my dictionary – where I got no particular guidance. A quick search of the phrase on Google News confirmed that most of the better papers had it "down," e.g., the newspaper Scotland on Sunday reporting on a contest to vote for a new Scottish national anthem. (A Google News check for such a question is especially appropriate for a publication like this particular magazine, which has with no stylebook of its own to settle an issue.)

The editor's question to me made me think further: The event was likely to have a printed program conveying much of the same timeline as in our little sidebar. And there "national anthem" and other phrases would surely be capped. Maybe that was OK.

Why so? I let the wheels turn a little longer, and here's what I came up with: Uppercasing and lowercasing is one of the ways the fourth estate speaks truth to power. The news media in their various forms often lowercase words that government officials or corporate spinmeisters want capitalized.

Lowercasing words that powerful people want capped can be a kind of guerrilla action in favor of public accountability – not as big a deal, perhaps, as asking tough questions at press conferences or conducting in-depth investigations, but worth doing nonetheless.

The organizers of the event have an interest in presenting everything about it as important – capital letters; big type. Exclamation points, even! An independent publication aspiring to some objectivity, however, may find that lowercase letters help it convey a certain egalitarianism, an unwillingness to be impressed by rank or wealth or prestige.

"Up or down?" is one of those questions that occupy a surprisingly large amount of space in the head of a copy editor. To cap – capitalize – or not? The very broad trend is "down." I remember when we made the shift at the Monitor from "Reagan Administration" to "Reagan administration." It was, in fact, during the Reagan years.

About the same time, we dropped the rule of capping "the President," even when it appeared without a name if it referred to the American president. This let us avoid the rather undiplomatic effect of a sentence such as, "The President and the prime minister met for two hours in the Oval Office." But we lost the opportunity to have a space-saving way of differentiating between the President of the United States and, let's say, the president of the Citizens' Committee to Protect the Raspberry Patch on the Back Side of Prospect Hill Park.

On balance, though, I think this lowercasing is a good fit with the best of the Monitor's institutional culture.  Some news organizations with their relentless "up" styles seem to take on the self-importance of those they cover. We will not name names, but they know who they are and you do, too.

One of the ways that spinmeisters control the terms of a public debate is by coining specific names for initiatives, campaigns, and the like that the media have to cap because of the rules about capitalizing proper names. To revisit our national anthem example: "The Star-Spangled Banner" itself would be capped, and enclosed in quote marks, too, not because it's the national anthem, but because it's a specific song. "The Nearness of You" or "Stairway to Heaven" would get the same treatment.

The specific code names the Department of Defense comes up with, for example, more or less require capitalization, just as personal names do. "The Iraq war" is still lowercased in the Monitor and many other publications. But "Operation Enduring Freedom," the US government's name for its military response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is "up," as are other such code names. (One of my regular e-mail correspondents suggests that there's an Orwellian weirdness in the double entendre of "enduring" in this use – as if freedom were one more thing we had to put up with.)

At this point I should note that although there's been a broad trend toward "down" styles, there's a countertrend of individual items making their way into "up" status over time. Long after the code name "Operation Enduring Freedom has faded from most people's memory, I can imagine, the Iraq war will be calcified into history as the Iraq War.

The secure zone in Baghdad started out as "the green zone," in quotes because that's how it was known. Now it's  the Green Zone, with caps but no quotes. By the time the coalition forces leave Iraq, it may be a separate country.

Have you noticed? There's a new front in the global war on terror, or GWOT: "aspirational terrorism."

The FBI announced earlier this month that it had disrupted an Al Qaeda plot to attack transportation tunnels between New York City and New Jersey. To quote the Associated Press:

One US official called the plot "largely aspirational" and described the Internet conversations as mostly extremists discussing and conceptualizing the plot. The official said no money had been transferred, nor had other similar operational steps been taken.

In other words, the threat was not imminent, but the federal officials who arrested Assem Hammoud clearly felt that it was a real goal on the part of the plotters.

The official's sound bite represented an echo of a phrase from some weeks before, when federal officials announced the disruption of another plot, this one to attack the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago – the tallest building in the United States, for those who are keeping score, and we know you're out there.

At that point, John Pistole, deputy director of the FBI, described the state of that plot more "aspirational than operational." Pistole's words made for a good quote – its almost-rhyme made it catchy, but not as kitschy as an exact rhyme could so easily be.

But as I write this in Word, the red squiggly line that signals spelling or grammatical unhappiness keeps popping up under "aspirational." What's up with that? I think it's a sign that the word is coming into a new prominence, and the usage elves may be a little behind the curve.

"Aspire," as a verb, is rooted in the notion of "breathing on" some goal or other – panting for it, we might say colloquially. That "spir" element is familiar from "inspiration" and its verb form, "inspire." This is used transitively to refer to some metaphorical breathing life into someone – a general inspiring his troops, for instance. (On your camping trip this summer, think of yourself as striving to "inspire" that air mattress or inflatable beach toy.)

One aspires to something (greatness, perhaps) or to do something: "He aspires to finish the marathon in less than three hours."

"Aspiration," the noun, is the goal one is, etymologically at least, breathing on: "His aspiration is to finish the marathon is less than three hours." So far, so good.

"Aspirational," the adjective, seems a little trickier. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this one back to 1887 (which is recent, by its standards) and provides a rather minimalist definition: "Belonging to or characterized by aspiration."

Among the usage examples it cites is one from 1967, "Everybody banging away at that final aspirational aria." Meaning what? The aria the audience knows will end the whole production so everyone can go home?

Encarta is a little more useful here, offering as a definition, "ambitious, showing a desire or ambition to achieve something, especially self-improvement or material success," as in "the aspirational working class."

The world of marketing has given us the terms "aspirational age" and "aspirational brand." An aspirational age is one whose characteristics customers strive to embody, and in the West that age is thought to be 16 or 17. The idea is that marketers can pitch to this age and reach not only people who are that age but those who haven't noticed that they are past it. (My friends at Wikipedia are mum on how well this works with, say, vacuum cleaners or hedge trimmers.)

An aspirational brand is one sought after but not available to the masses for reasons of price and/or production capacity. More broadly, "aspirational," is being used on both sides of the Atlantic (though more so in Britain, it appears) to suggest both an ambition and the fact of its being unrealized.

It's being discovered as a way of acknowledging that the glass is half empty while pointing out that it is also half full. To say that a goal "remains aspirational" is a positive-sounding way of saying you haven't reached it but haven't given up on it either.

And no wonder it's catching on. After all, "aspirational" is a dignified-sounding five-syllable word, which, if you're a government official trying to buy yourself time to think on your feet under hot TV lights must seem like a godsend. If I were, say, an FBI spokeswoman trying to talk about alleged plotters under arrest who may not be the real deal, I'd rather be able to call them "aspirational terrorists" than have to call them wannabes. Wouldn't you?

Now excuse me while I go reconnect with my aspirational inner 16-year-old.

If there are no dials left, why are so many people "dialing back"?

Bill Gates, for instance, will be disengaging further from Microsoft and spending more of his time with his charitable activities – a process described as "dialing back."

Similarly, The Kansas City Star reported the other day on a consultant who would be "dialing back" her other activities after having landed a juicy six-figure contract at the stadium where the Chiefs and the Royals play.

The phrase is still distinctive enough that when I went searching the other day, Google politely inquired whether I perhaps really meant to look for "calling back." But come on, 27,000 hits isn't chopped liver.

Friends with ties to Detroit, the Motor City, connect "dialing back" to the adjustments one makes to the controls on a production line in a factory.

Never mind that those "dials" have largely been replaced by digital readouts. Dialing back the speed of the conveyor belt on a production line could be a good metaphor for Mr. Gates's adjustment to his daily agenda.

Sometimes "dialing back" happens quasi-literally. A Denver Post reporter wrote recently of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "dialing back the volume" after she had had to raise her voice to be heard over a raucous crowd.

It was an interesting choice of phrase in connection with the junior senator from New York. At one level it meant simply that she lowered her voice, and that may be all the reporter had in mind. Subliminally, though, it suggested an image of a senator who is her own sound engineer, fiddling with the knobs in her mental control booth, making lightning-swift decisions about how to engage with her audience.

Elsewhere in the political realm, and in corporate life as well, the thing that gets "dialed back" is often "expectations." I can imagine some school of communications offering a hot new master's degree in "expectations management." (It would be useful on Wall Street, too.)

Shortly after the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, in April 2003, Newsweek reporter Rod Nordland used the phrase "dialing back expectations" to refer to the Bush administration's goal at a public meeting of military officials and Iraqi politicians on the ground in Baghdad. In retrospect, it would seem to have been a smart tactic.

A year and a half later, The Washington Post reported that the administration was "dialing back expectations" that the federal tax code would be scrapped in favor of a flat tax.

Before anyone did any dialing, the dial did its job without any help.

"Dial" is traced, though not with certainty, to the Latin word for day. The idea is that a sundial traced the daily circuit of the sun, and the concept was expanded to include not only the dials of mechanical clocks, which could tell time indoors and on cloudy days, but also all clocklike disks on which information is displayed, as on a barometer or a fuel-tank gauge.

There also seems to have been a concept of the moon dial, one of the most notable examples of which is at Queens College of Cambridge University in England. It suggests new possibilities for "I'll meet you under the clock," doesn't it?

It's tempting to see "dialing back" as connected to the dial telephone, now growing quainter by the minute. (When I toured the Eisenhower National Historic Site with my family a few years ago, my brother wanted to make sure that his daughter, then still in single digits, noted the rotary-dial telephone on display at the president's retirement home.)

The telephonic dial is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: "a circular plate marked with letters, numbers, etc., above which is a disc that can be rotated by means of finger-holes to establish a connection with another telephone." It all sounds so stately and civilized I want to sit down and have a cup of tea.

This usage goes back to 1879. But it apparently took a while for the concept to catch on; OED also quotes an English magazine explaining in 1921 (over 40 years later) the fine points of telephony: "In order to dial a number, say 7, the finger is put in the hole above 7, and the dial is rotated to the stop and let go."

Now that I think of it, I did once upon a time stay in a bed and breakfast in a very small village in the south of England where the phone number was 7. I don't mean seven digits, I mean that the actual number was 7. (Or maybe it was 3. It was a very small village. It might not have had seven phones.)

The original dial you were told not to touch – not to tune to another station, that is – was on a radio. "Don't touch that dial" was the opening to the old Blondie and Dagwood show.

The Colbert Report has adopted the catchphrase and updated it for a newer medium: "Don't touch that dial. And, if your TV has a dial, go buy a new one." Stephen Colbert himself, never shy about sharing his views, is known for getting all cranked up, but never dialing back.
 

A cri du coeur has come to me from some junior colleagues – conveyed to me by an intermediary editor: Help! Prepositional phrases are getting weird! It's hard to be sure which preposition to use anymore. Maybe "on" and "in," however wonderfully short they are, aren't always the best choices, even in a tight space; maybe they aren't infinitely interchangeable with "about" or "around" or even "throughout."

Hmm. One of my English teachers in school told us of someone who thought that the best way to teach parts of speech – the basic classification of words according to their functions in context – was to start with prepositions and prepositional phrases. It sounded strange at the time – surely nouns and verbs are more important, all of us right-thinking eighth-graders immediately concurred. (That's how I recall it anyway, but I may be projecting backward from my current grownup sense of things.)

Over time, though, I've come to see that there might be a logic to this approach: Prepositional phrases tend to be add-ons, modifiers; trim them away and deal with them first, and you'll recognize what's left over as the bones of the sentence. "He walked through the town with his pack on his back, in search of a room for the night." Strip away the prepositional phrases and that reduces to "He walked."

"Preposition" – like the other words for parts of speech, it comes from Latin – means roughly "that which is placed before." Thus "through" comes before "town," "with" before "pack," and so on. Prepositions are largely about relationships – where the pack was relative to "his back" – "on" it, for instance. And we all know how challenging relationships can be.

Nouns and verbs are like the big pieces of the system that travel home from the computer store encased in plastic foam within their cardboard cartons. Prepositions are like the little extras – albeit critical ones – you think of at the checkout: "Oh, gosh! We need an extra USB cable so we can attach the camera! Can you grab one for me from Aisle 7?"

Or to go to another metaphor: Prepositions are like the little bits of shim a carpenter carries in his pocket to help a 21st-century door hang right in its frame in a 19th-century building.

Idioms involving prepositions can be among the toughest parts of learning a foreign language. And they can be surprisingly hard in one's native language. I know by ear – at least I think I do – that it's "forbidden to do this" but "prohibited from doing that" – but I'm not sure where I would look that up. Dictionaries often don't provide the same guidance on idiomatic nuances as they with straight-ahead definitions of nouns and verbs.

In English, the use of prepositions is often a regional marker: Copy editors in the United States fight the battle over different from/different than, but outside the US, "different to" is an established usage – "different to what you'd expect," for instance. It's sometimes a giveaway for a stealth Canadian in southern California, I've found.

I learned "wait on" as the idiom for how a salesclerk helps a customer, and "wait for" as the idiom for what I did to the school bus in the morning. But when our family moved to the South, we heard "waiting on" when my ear had been trained for "waiting for," as in "He's not ready to go yet, and I guess we'll just have to wait on him." (That "on" was likely to have a longish "o," by the way, almost "own," a feature not always picked up in representations of Southern accents on stage or in the movies.)

There's another kind of "waiting on" something that has loomed larger as I've grown up and had to deal more with large bureaucracies and other immovable objects: "We'll have to wait on that." It doesn't mean "wait for that." It means that "with regard to that," whatever it is, we will have to wait – until interest rates go down, the boss makes up his mind, the coop board meets next month, whatever. This is an example of that lovely concise space-saving "on" that may be one of the prepositions that have my above-mentioned colleagues a little nervous.

Especially in broadcasting, prepositional phrases are often pressed into service to provide a kind of stretchable verbal connective tissue that sometimes gets stretched too far, and snaps.

Thus: "In other news today, the president received the visiting prime minister of Lower Slobovia." Not quite true; the president received the prime minister in the East Room or the Oval Office or wherever. But he didn't receive him "in other news."

Print can rely on certain typographical conventions – a section headline of "World News Briefs," for instance, to warn the reader of a coming jumble of little bits from all over – to provide context (literally that which is woven in with something else) for the main narrative line of a news item, however brief.

Broadcasting, on the other hand, often has to rely on the single silken thread of a newsreader's voice to tie a bundle of disparate items together. No wonder the president sometimes finds himself "in other news."

Sometimes things get even more baroque: "After headlines at the top of the hour, the governor tells the Legislature to go fly a kite."

Well, not quite. A sentence like this if often a kind of shorthand for something else: "After the hourly news bulletin, our anchor will have an exchange with a talking head who will explain why the warm-up jokes at the beginning of the governor's speech at the big power breakfast this morning indicate profound disdain for the state's lawmakers." You can see why they would condense something like this, can't you?

Print has its prepositional peculiarities, too, though. Around the English-speaking world, the line under a writer's byline that indicates his or her status at a newspaper - what the Monitor calls a "staffline" - uses the preposition "of": "Joe Blow, staff reporter of The Daily Bugle."

And yet when Joe is at a police line trying to talk his way across it, he will invariably describe himself as "a reporter for the Bugle."

Why is that? my above-mentioned colleagues were asking the other day. I can't really tell you, guys. It just is.

I know. That sounds like the authoritarian because-I-said-so style of parenting that's fallen out of favor even among parents. But sometimes that's just the way it is.