Have you ever noticed that the more certain you are of something, the fewer words it takes to say it? And conversely, the more you have to insist on your confidence of something, or in someone, the more you call that confidence into question?

So it was the other day when I heard news that a young Boy Scout named Michael Auberry had gone missing while on a camping trip in western North Carolina. (It may take a village to raise a child. But in the 24-hour news cycle, it can take an entire nation to worry about one when he’s lost.)

As the search was going into its third night, a National Park Service spokeswoman said, "We're still confident that this is a search-and-rescue operation," delicately deflecting the question of the boy's survival.

The next report I heard, she was "confident" the lad had been found. Now that was good news – but maybe less good than the Park Service meant it to be. If he has been found, why can't they just say so? "Confident" at that point didn't inspire confidence. Are they afraid they've found a lost boy, but not the one they're looking for?

I didn't really relax until more detail came out, including word that the boy was dehydrated but otherwise in good condition. The spokeswoman's announcement at the end was simply, "We have our missing Boy Scout."

The principle here is that people sometimes use language to signal what they want to be true rather than what is true. Sometimes this is an expression of hopefulness – or wishful thinking, if you want to be cynical. Sometimes the motivation is duplicity. Sometimes it's more innocent than that.

Oh, the paradox of such "confidence"! To have to articulate it at all is to call into question whatever it is you are confident of.

A woman fishing for her keys at the bottom of a capacious bag insists to herself, "I know they're in here somewhere. I'm sure I picked them up off the kitchen counter as I was heading out…" Once they're actually located, of course, the dialogue-with-self becomes simpler. "Oh, here they are."

On the same day that rescuers were locating the missing scout in the North Carolina mountains, another sort of rescue operation was under way in Washington, on behalf of the beleaguered attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

President Bush made an early morning call March 20 to Mr. Gonzales. Tony Snow, briefing the White House press corps later that morning, characterized the call as a "very strong vote of confidence" in Gonzales, despite the ongoing controversy over the dismissals of eight United States attorneys around the country.

But I couldn't help noticing that much of the reporting on Mr. Bush's call and Mr. Snow's briefing ran under headlines saying things like "Bush phone call fails to defuse pressure on Gonzales to resign."

And the passing of former Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri earlier this month reminded the reading public how he had enjoyed "1,000 percent" confidence of George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972 – confidence, that is, right until McGovern dropped him from the ticket 18 days after naming him, after some revelations came out about Eagleton's medical history.

There's an idiom in English for situations like this. The source – as happens so often – is Shakespeare. In "Hamlet," the queen says, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." In the context of the play, she's complaining that "the lady" – the figure in Hamlet's play within a play who is meant to represent her – asserts her love for her husband so aggressively that she invites suspicion.

[Editor's note: The original version of this blog contained a paragraph that incorrectly referred to elements of the murder plot in "Hamlet."]

"Protesting too much" has made its way into the language. It describes those who, by aggressively asserting their own confidence in what they say, manage to shake ours.

However dazzlingly original people try to be with language, much of the time they fall back on old standbys, set phrases that are not so much clichés as expressions of the universals of the human experience: hello, goodbye, please, thank you, I love you, I’m so sorry to hear.

And thus most chefs, I imagine, don’t mind if their cuisine is pronounced "delicious" by those who have just enjoyed it. Many of those in other artistic fields – painting, music, landscape design – are pleased to hear their fans call their work "beautiful."

For those of us who toil in the world of news and public affairs, the word we most want to hear, day in and day out, is "interesting."

Interesting? It’s not exactly on par with the philosopher's ideal of the good, the true, and the beautiful, is it?

A reader has reminded me of this particular deficit in the language: "The word that I use so much and find so boring and can’t seem to find better choices [for] is 'interesting," she writes. "I could use help with this."

Hey, you and me both, sister!

Journalists are people who live in constant fear that readers/listeners/viewers/visitors are always on the verge of turning the page, changing the channel, clicking away to something else. And as a group, journalists are always reminding one another of the many options "news consumers" have for other things to do.

To be "interesting" – to hold the reader's attention to the end – is about as good as it gets in this world.

When I was first learning the word "interesting" as a very small child, I saw it seemed to be associated with grownups furrowing their brows and fiddling with their glasses to get a better look at something.

"Interesting" is sometimes a bit of diplomatic lingo to cover an unsuccessful experiment, notably in the kitchen. "This sauce, dear, is really quite interesting." Note that this comment is rarely followed by, "May I have a second helping?"

"May you live in interesting times" is supposed to be a Chinese curse, but that turns out to be folklore, perpetuated by Robert Kennedy, who used the line in a speech in South Africa in 1966.

The etymological roots of interesting and of interest, whence it comes, are far from clear. "There is much that is obscure in the history of this word," says the Oxford English Dictionary of interest.

As a Latin word, interest is a verb that means "[it] is of importance, makes a difference" – words music to a journalist's ears, truly. Early examples of "interest" were financial and legal. Interest in the sense of curiosity goes back to 1771: "That sparked my interest," that is, my attention.

The financial/legal and the intellectual senses of interested have gotten a little muddled at times. I remember reading a biography of a 19th-century financier referred to as being "interested" in a particular company. What was meant, I realized after a moment of confusion, was that he owned a share of the firm. It had captured not only his attention but a share of his wallet.

The knock on interesting is that it's a lazy word. It's often used to signal, "My wheels are turning, but I don't yet really know what to think."

What synonyms we could press into service? There's engaging. But engaging doesn't keep its distance quite the way interesting does. If I find a movie "engaging," I'm not thinking about it; I'm caught up in it. That's why engaging is an appealing concept, but also why it's not an ideal synonym for interesting.

Interesting is a "think"; engaging is a "feel." And engaging doesn't do diplomatic service the way interesting sometimes does, as in the "interesting sauce."

Roget's Thesaurus parks interesting right after engaging in a list of terms connected with "love," in the broadest sense – a very broad sense. Other possibilities gathered nearby: enchanting, captivating, fascinating, bewitching. All of these seem completely over the top for what I'm looking for: a synonym for interesting that has more energy but is still suitable in an everyday context.

Looking at Roget's list, I can't help thinking that interesting is the geeky friend that engaging has brought along to the party, where it doesn't quite fit in.

Back in the days when it was easier for audiences to think of a guy in a Wehrmacht uniform as a comic figure, Arte Johnson used to do a shtick as a German soldier on the old "Laugh-In" television show. He managed to make a national catch phrase out of his cryptic utterance, "ver-r-r-r-ry interesting." Often followed with an abrupt addendum, delivered in a similar comic accent - "but shtupit!" – it was his comment on whatever silliness his fellow troupers had just presented.

It provided some (much-needed) breathing room in the fast-paced show. And it maybe was about as "interesting" as interesting ever gets.

There are many words that people often mispronounce when they say them aloud, because they know them only from reading.

Cache (pronounced "cash") and cachet (rhymes with "sashay") fall into this category.

Radio reports sometimes mention  "weapons caches"  – pronounced "ca-SHAYS." Oops!

Conversely, I've seen in print comments to the effect that this or that business school, for instance, has "great cache" or "caché." Cache and cachet seem to pop up in each other's place like twins continually mistaken for each other in a Shakespearean comedy. And is it twins or maybe even triplets – what about that "caché"?

As I write this, Microsoft Word keeps trying to save me the embarrassment of the (normally incorrect) acute accent mark by slicing it off. But some people are not so well supported by their technology, it appears. And that French-looking acute does seem to have a certain, well, cachet. What can I say?

Just to be clear: Cache is a hiding place for food, ammunition, or similar supplies, or the supplies themselves. It has often been spelled the way it's been pronounced. Cache is associated particularly with explorers of the American West – Lewis and Clark, for instance – and the Arctic.

"As this was to be a point in our homeward journey, I made a cache (a term used in all this country for what is hidden in the ground) of a barrel of pork," John C. Fremont wrote in his 1842 account of exploring the Rocky Mountains. This gets to the idea of a cache as something you stash along the way, knowing you'll be coming back that way later.

A cachet, on the other hand, was originally a seal – a king's personal seal, as distinct from an official seal. Then the meaning stretched to cover any indication of approval conveying great prestige (e.g., "Istvan's new place has won the cachet of the Best of Boston award for the Best New Afghan-Hungarian Deli").

From there cachet has come to refer to the prestige itself. Merriam Webster cites Truman Capote on this point: "Being rich doesn't have the cachet it used to."

Cachet has its very dark side, though. A letter of cachet (lettre de cachet, in French) was an order by the French king, under his private seal (going back to that original meaning of cachet) containing an order, often for someone's imprisonment or death.

A happier specialized use of cachet is a philatelic one – the little advertising message or other motto on a postmark or on a postage meter impression, "Season's Greetings" or "Support Your Local Merchants" or whatever. (Isn't it a kick to know just the right term for something like that?)

If cache and cachet are so often confused, is there perhaps a reason for that? After all, if there seems to be a family resemblance, it may be that the words are related. Indeed yes. Both derive from the French word cacher, to hide. (French children playing cache-cache are playing "hide and seek" – or "hide and go seek," in the wordier version I learned as a kid.)

But cache and cachet, like twins separated at birth, have gone off on different paths. Cache started out as a hiding place for supplies, then became a hidden supply of something, and more recently has become a not-so-hidden supply. Cachet, on the other hand, started as the personal seal, the less public seal, the seal that was more or less hidden.

But the part of cachet that developed, that had legs, so to speak, was not its "hidden" quality but its connection with high-level approval.

Omnibus comes to mind as another example of widely divergent meanings springing from a single root. Omnibus is Latin and means "for all." In the 19th century it was applied to public conveyances - those providing "carriage for all." The word was universally shortened to "bus" and then applied to all manner of carts and conveyances.

But legislators often speak of "omnibus bills" – those with something for everyone, aka "Christmas tree bills." There the emphasis is on the "everyone" rather than the transport, and "omnibus" is not abbreviated.

Fortunately bus and omnibus cause no particular pronunciation problems. Confusions over cache/cachet and the like, on the other hand, are often the mark of the autodidact, the one who learns from his or her own reading but then may not get a chance to discuss.

My own high-water mark as an autodidact came some years ago as I was getting ready to do a television interview in which I was to discuss the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . As a production assistant was going through the ticklish business of running microphone wires through my sleeve, it suddenly dawned on me that for all the time I spent reading Csikszentmihalyi's book, I really wasn't sure how to pronounce his name.

Fortunately, a slightly panicked call to his publisher’s publicists settled the confusion.

Thank goodness for publicity departments.

A trip to the marketplace of ideas is not unlike any other shopping trip. One tends to come back with things that were not on the original list.

So it was the other day. I was looking to nail down the date at which English took over from French as the language of Parliament. I found it all right: 1362 (to the extent that this change can be assigned to a particular date, which is another story).

But I also ran across references to the plain language movement – a quiet but fairly broad campaign, it seems, in both official and unofficial circles, to simplify the language of legislation, government, and the courts. What a good idea.

There is a connection between these two phenomena – the shift from French to English and the effort to simplify legal writing. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 meant that French was imposed as the language of government and law.

The Normans are part of the reason modern English has such a large vocabulary: We have abundances of synonyms, French- and Latin-derived words as well as Anglo-Saxon ones: royal, regal, and kingly, for example. (I suppose we could add "monarchical" as well, but we can't blame the Normans for that.) If the Normans made life linguistically richer, they didn't make it simpler.

As David Elliott, a Canadian lawyer and advocate of plain language, explains,

…[T]he scribes of the day had a problem. They wanted to be sure that [legal] transactions were effective – but how could they achieve that with a language in transition and a population that clung to English. The answer was simple – use two or three words instead of one. Use the Norman word, the English word, and if necessary the Latin as well.

This is the source of some of the familiar paired legal phrases: "free and clear" or "last will and testament." Legal scriveners were paid by the word in earlier centuries, and that, Elliott suggests, was a further incentive to prolixity.

The plain language movement has a manifestation within the US government, the Plain English Action and Information Network, a group of federal employees trying to improve communications within government and especially with citizens. The network's website includes a page of funny headlines, but also, more seriously, one of various government mandates for plain language. It includes a reference to a 1998 legal case in which

...the court found that the forms issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service were so confusing and affirmatively misleading that they violated a person's due-process rights.

In Britain, there's the Plain English Campaign, which posts a regular "Gobbledygook of the week" feature and gives what it calls "Golden Bull" awards for truly outstanding examples of blather.

Interestingly, the Swedish government seems to be into plain speak, too, and I don't think they can blame either the Normans or the Romans for messing up their language.

Plain language is an idea that seems to have found some resonance even within the European Union – or so I surmise after finding a secret decoder page for "Eurojargon." It defines such terms as "absorptive capacity" and "comitology," and parses the differences between the European Council, the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe.

(Meanwhile, there seems to be a rear-guard action by the French, or by some Francophones, to set French as the language of the law within the EU.)

Legions of wordsmiths have enlisted in the plain language movement and are available as consultants and coaches to advise government agencies, lawyers, and others on how to win the battle against blather.

For amateurs in the privacy of their own homes, other help may be just a few keystrokes away.

I've been working with the readability statistics feature of Microsoft Word the past few months. It's had me tearing my hair at times, but I have to allow that I've learned a fair bit from it. Anyone working with Word should at least know it's there.

The stats include "grade level" and an "ease of reading" feature – the higher the percentile reading, the better; and writing destined for a broader public should have a score pushing 60.

There are other tools as well. The Plain English Campaign reports on a new "waffle-buster" program due out imminently, for instance.

Concern about plain language has been around a long time. OMB Watch, a publication which tracks government transparency, reported last year: Hearing Highlights Confusion Caused by 'Legalese' in Regulation.

Use of plain language can "help level the playing field" of public process, allowing citizens and small businesses to play a role, instead of shutting them out in favor of large organizations and expensive consultants, OMB Watch suggested.

Thomas Jefferson would agree.

One plain-language advocacy organization has a quote it ascribes to Thomas Jefferson, criticizing the traditional language of British statutes,

...which from their verbosity, their endless tautologies, their involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their multiplied efforts at certainty by saids and aforesaids, by ors and by ands, to make them more plain, do really render them more perplexed and incomprehensible, not only to common readers, but to lawyers themselves.

One can only hope that Jefferson was being a bit ironic when he wrote this. I've just taken this quotation, tweaked it slightly to make it a complete sentence, and run it through Microsoft's readability program.

For "ease of reading" it ranked down below the seventh percentile.

Who knew that copy editing skill could protect against identity theft?

A few weeks ago I received a dubious e-mail purportedly from my bank, claiming that I needed to update my "account information." I didn't follow the link provided in the message. ("Click here for an opportunity to enter your Social Security number and mother's maiden name so that we can suck money out of your bank account and abscond to Tahiti.")

I trashed the message pretty quickly, because I've heard the warnings about e-mails like this. But what if I hadn't? What about this message absolutely screamed "phishing scam?"

Well, for a start, it promised "incryption" of my data instead of the correctly spelled "encryption."

The e-mail also had a reference to "SLL" instead of "SSL." Before I looked up "SSL" a moment ago, just about all I knew about it was that it had something to do with the security of online transactions. But I did know it wasn't "SLL."

That's a copy editor's view of the world – a thin veneer of knowledge about a lot of things, enough to know when to reach for the dictionary or other resource. It struck me that I've often spotted phishing scams because the pages are badly edited. Why is it easier for hackers to fake logos and write the necessary code than to get the words spelled right?

Possible explanations:

    * The Web is already rife with spelling errors, so that most people don't notice them and don't see them as a tipoff to a scam. (Sigh. Another sign of the precarious state of civilization.)

    * People who have good writing and editing skills, or at least know enough to hire people who do, can earn a living more honorably than by phishing.  (I'd like to think this goes without saying.)

    * Copy editors are too noble a group to sully themselves in the employ of phishers. (This is the one my heart wants to believe.)

Bottom line: Spelling and grammar still count. Thank you, O English teachers of my 20th-century childhood! The knowledge you imparted protects me today from Internet scams we never imagined in the classrooms of yore.

A reader's lament

"I wish there was an antonym of 'literally' which people would use," a reader writes.

"I suppose there is 'metaphorically' or 'figuratively,' but people do not use them," he continues. "Instead it seems common to say 'literally' when the opposite is meant. For example, I heard a football commentator say, 'He literally read the quarterback like a book.' But to read a quarterback literally like a book would entail sitting down in a favorite chair, spreading the quarterback across your lap, and gleaning information from the letters inscribed on the quarterback."

It's a vivid bit of imagery, isn't it? I would concur with the disgruntled reader that "literally" doesn't add much in his example.

But on the other hand, to have to say "figuratively" when using figurative language is like having to say "joke" when you're trying to be funny. (Sometimes you do, in fact, and it's a sign that you're not.)

At another level, though, "literally" on top of a simile or metaphor adds a layer of hyperbole. This is itself an honorable rhetorical device. It's like telling an outrageous yarn and then appending to it the words, "True story!"

I remember hearing the Australian novelist Peter Carey explain that by calling his novel about Ned Kelly, one of his country's best-known folk heroes, "True Story of the Kelly Gang," he would (wink) signal to his readers that it was fiction. A less assertive title, he suggested, might confuse readers into thinking he was dabbling in history.

But the other thing about "literally" is that sometimes life does ape art. Every once in a while, for instance, a view truly is breathtaking. Real life matches up with the idioms. "Oh, yes, that's where that comes from," one tells oneself. There is something satisfying in that.

Sometimes, however, the literalness of an idiom is a little too close to real life for comfort. The ice-covered sidewalks of Boston these past several days have reminded me of those of Bonn my first New Year's Day in Germany 11 years ago.

I was a little surprised when a friend wished me "einen nicht zu wörtlichen guten Rutsch ins Neujahr."

Wie, bitte? Come again?

"A not-too-literal 'good slip into the New Year'" is how her comment would translate. I'd never heard the expression before, but it's a standard German New Year's greeting.

Rutschen, I did know, means to slip or slide, as on ice. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid doing, New Year's Day or not. An odd turn of phrase for wishing someone well, surely.

I've just done a little research, though, and found two sources that trace this idiom not to the ordinary verb rutschen but to a Hebrew word, "Rosh," meaning "head" or "beginning," as in Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

And that's the truth. Literally. But without "incryption."