The scandal embroiling the World Bank touches on many significant issues – international efforts to combat corruption in the developing world, for instance.

At a more mundane level, though, I'd be interested if the whole episode leaves us with a better term to describe Shaha Ali Riza than as Bank president Paul Wolfowitz's "girlfriend." If you’re just tuning in: Mr. Wolfowitz and Ms. Riza have been an item for several years. When he arrived at the Bank a couple of years ago, she was already there as an employee.

That meant that in his new role, he would be her supervisor, albeit indirectly. It was clear to all concerned that, given their personal relationship, this new professional relationship would violate Bank rules against nepotism.

(Now there’s a good example of a word stretched far beyond its original meaning. Nepotism started out referring to favoritism shown to nephews, especially papal ones, but now covers the territory of improper favors, especially jobs, granted to relatives and friends to the detriment of those competing on the merits of their professional qualifications.)

Accordingly, a deal was struck to find Riza a rather long-term "temporary" professional home at the US State Department, at a significant salary raise. It all gives new meaning to the term "sweetheart deal," doesn't it?

The circumstances of that deal, Wolfowitz's involvement in it, and its propriety, are now at issue, and at the heart of the controversy surrounding his tenure at the Bank. Those are questions that need to be answered.

I'll leave that task to someone else. I will note, though, that Riza is unquestionably a grownup, professional woman, not a "girl." What is the term for two bona fide grownups of opposite sexes, in this case both divorced, who keep company? I suppose the question I'm asking is, What is the adult form of "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"?

As I recall, Miss Manners says that polite society recognizes three statuses for relationships: marriage, engagement, and friendship. In a purely social context, e.g., an informal dinner party, it's fairly easy to sort out the "just friends" kind of friends from the friends on their way to some other status.

In a professional context, on the other hand, the informal clues are often less obvious, since few pairs of office sweethearts will, say, hold hands in the weekly staff meeting. And yet a number of people may have good reason to want to know the nature of two people's relationship. Are they casual social acquaintances, or something more?

The New York Times has generally opted decorously for "companion" as its preferred term for Riza in relation to Wolfowitz. It is a word of great nebulosity but no particular romance. It suggests simultaneously various kinds of governesses or chaperons, one of the attendants who hang out with a goddess, and, at the upper reaches of what Miss Manners calls "advanced civilization," the worthy Knights Companion of the Order of the Garter. (Despite its racy name it is a very respectable and prestigious organization.) And we shouldn't forget to mention the faithful Fido, lying by his master's feet in front of the fire.

Just over the weekend I was noticing an airline ad featuring "companion fares." These are common in the travel industry, which uses a broad term to cover just about anyone who comes along with you – spouse, parent, child, friend, Aunt Tillie. I checked out the two hot tickets in the ad, however, and neither of them looks at all like the Aunt Tillies I know.

Slate has noticed a lapse from the "companion" usage in the news columns of the Times, in favor of "girlfriend":

Upon reading an article this week referring to charges that embattled World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz had "used his influence to raise the salary of his girlfriend," veteran New York Times readers in mid-coffee sip could be forgiven for performing a spit-take. The use of the g-word for Wolfowitz's 52-year-old consort, Shaha Ali Riza, was a new frontier for the newspaper.

"Cherchez la femme," they say. But when you find her, will you know what to call her?

T. S. Eliot called it the cruelest month, but April seems to have something for everyone: for baseball fans, the season opener; for tax accountants, a nice buzz of activity at the office; for amateur meteorologists, freak snowstorms. And for the truly serious policy wonks, the semiannual meetings in Washington of the World Bank and the International Monetary fund.

Reading the New Yorker piece on Paul Wolfowitz and the controversies at the World Bank during his tenure there as president, I ran across a term used in a number of contexts, generally having to do with development (poor countries' economies) or major improvement (poorly performing public schools): "capacity building."

The United Nations Development Program has a definition of "capacity building" that is, as you might expect, a mouthful:

the creation of an enabling environment with appropriate policy and legal frameworks, institutional development, including community participation (of women in particular), human resources development and strengthening of managerial systems, adding that, UNDP recognizes that capacity building is a long-term, continuing process, in which all stakeholders participate (ministries, local authorities, non-governmental organizations and water user groups, professional associations, academics, and others.)

Well. Does that make it perfectly clear?

Another way to express it might be to say that "capacity building" is the stuff you have to do to get to the starting line.

And while we're at it, just what is an "enabling environment," anyway? Our language of ability is often a little vague.

Note that "can," as in "I can read it myself," is what grammarians call a "defective verb." Defective in the sense that it's missing some of its pieces, such as a proper past tense. "I can leave at once." In the present tense, fine. For the past there's "could," but the same term is used in the conditional, which is confusing. And for the future, you have to switch to a completely different construction, "I will be able to."

To go from the sturdy Anglo-Saxon of "can" to the Latin-derived "able" is like having to go next door to borrow a silver teaspoon from the neighbors because the everyday flatware is all in the dishwasher.

Just what kind of capacity is meant tends to vary according to context. Blackanthem.com, an online journal of military news, recently had a report on "capacity building" needed in Afghanistan if local building tradespeople were to get a piece of the international contracting business, specifically with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

[The Corps] will require contractors to hire, train and mentor local Afghan workers as a means to grow the Afghanistan national engineering capacity. Among the other items [an American official] stressed were worksite safety, adherence to the agreed upon work schedule, conformance to quality standards and the need for open and honest communication. "Safety was very hard,” said [one of the local contractors]. “We had a hard time getting them to wear hard hats, boots and all – this is very good."

Capacity building in this sense is almost a kind of acculturation. "Capacity" derives from words meaning "ability to take in." In some cases the capacity that needs to be built seems to be a capacity to absorb help – whether international food aid or increased funding from a government ministry.

"Enable" is another word in the language of ability that is used in many senses simultaneously. It's typically been used with "to" constructions, enabling someone to do something.

Thus, from an online headline of the Daily Express, a Malaysian newspaper: "MAS price structure to enable M'sians to fly." This headline, on the face of it extremely optimistic, was meant to convey that new prices were intended to encourage Malaysians to see more of their own country by air.

Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Douglas Uggah Embas said Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has a different ticket price structure to enable Malaysians to visit interesting places in the country.

There's another sense of "enable," as a psychological term, which lives on mostly in noun form, referring to one who makes it possible for someone to persist in self-destructive behavior.

But if my quick sweep of Google News is any indication (and I think it is) the long-established use of "enable" with "to" (cf. the flying Malaysians) is being crowded out by the technological meaning of the word" to make (something) possible," or in simpler term, "to switch something on." You might say enable/disable is the new on/off.

In many nontechnical contexts (or as nontechnical as we get nowadays), we now often say "to enable (something)" where we once would have said "to make (something) possible." Thus an Australian pulp mill was recently reported to be "enabled."

Closer to home, the enabling some of us worry about is that of cookies – not the kind in the cookie jar but the kind on our computer – the kind needed to access certain websites.

Shall I enable cookies, one wonders, and risk letting online marketers find out more about me than I know myself? Or shall I disable them, and risk becoming some kind of cyberwallflower?

There are many possibilities here. I'll have to build a little capacity to understand them all.

"The language of film is universal."

At one of my local cinemas, I know that when I hear that little feel-good motto – repeated in enough different languages for a United Nations conference – we've come to the end of the caravan of trailers for coming attractions, and the beginning of the feature film.

It's hard to argue with the sentiment. Film as a medium does provide windows into other cultures – sometimes cultures only a few miles away from the movie house.

But movies have some peculiar language of their own. In fact, the way they talk about language itself is a little peculiar. It's enough to give language a bad name. I'm referring specifically to those little tag lines that explain why a film has been rated the way it has been by the Motion Picture Association of America, the people who have been cranking out the G's and R's and all since 1968.

The new flick, "The Hoax," for instance, about Clifford Irving's attempt to scam McGraw-Hill with a faked autobiography of Howard Hughes has been rated "R" – restricted to those 17 or older without parent or guardian – "for language." For language? Don't all movies have language? a visitor from Mars would ask. Wasn't that the whole point of "the talkies"?

No, what's meant here is profanity, vulgarisms, and the like. But to say so would take more space – more words – than we would like. So "language" becomes shorthand for "foul language," and we have another case of "bad" meanings driving the "good" meanings out. Language wouldn't be mentioned if it weren't an issue, and it wouldn't be an issue if it weren't "bad." (Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that some filmmakers actually seek out more "restrictive" ratings to appeal to more "sophisticated" audiences.)

We're unlikely to see a movie rated "R for language – sparkling wordplay." We do the same thing with terms like "weather" or "traffic" or even "health." A game isn't called on account of "weather" if it's a sunny day. The "traffic" we make allowance for in our travel plans is assumed to be heavy or slow-moving.

A quirky variant here is "momentary language," meaning, presumably, a few dirty words, rather than a nonstop stream of profanity, in an otherwise wholesome movie. I see it's a distinctive enough phrase that someone has glommed onto it as the title of a blog. "Momentary language" is an odd concept when you think about it – suggesting the sound going in and out during the showing of a movie. 

It makes me think of an episode when my college film series was showing a subtitled French movie and the sound conked out. We could follow what was going on because of the subtitles, but after a few moments an enterprising young man down front with a booming voice and a command of French took it upon himself to translate the subtitles back into French and declaim this version aloud for us all.

In addition to "language," the other term that gets knocked around in the jargon of movieland is "adult," as in "adult situations” used as shorthand for all kinds of, well, you know. In real life “adult situations” are often things like having to wrestle with your tax form, or getting stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, or having to deal with something dumb or awful the kids have done. I don't want "adult" to get a bad name, and I'm enough of an idealist to imagine a world in which "adult entertainment" means things like Jane Austen novels or Mozart symphonies.

Another kind of language figures into my moviegoing decisions: the capsule summary that's used to describe a film as it works its way into distributors' catalogues, newspaper and other film listings, and cinema newsletters. Those blurbs that one reads may or may not bear any relation to the trailers that one sees before the main film starts.

I saw the trailer for "Venus," the flick about Peter O'Toole falling for  a damsel 50 years younger. But I absolutely didn't connect it with the film I'd seen blurbed in the e-mail newsletter I get every week from a local cinema. OK, so part of the problem was that I completely read over the title of the movie – my bad. But another part of it was that the blurb didn't mention Peter O'Toole – their bad.

The newsletter blurb, summarizing the plot with a reference to "a pair of veteran actors," made it all sound earnest and, well, a trifle dull: "Jessie, who had arrived with an enormous chip on her shoulders, slowly learns from Maurice the value of respect - for herself as well as others." Reviewers seemed to be seeing a somewhat different movie, in which "Maurice … takes a partly avuncular, partly lecherous interest in the grandniece of one of his pals."

This doesn't directly contradict the bit about "the value of respect," but it does suggest a situation that is more complicated. But then I heard some film critics on the radio handicapping the Oscars a day or two before the big night earlier this year. They mentioned a movie about "two aging actors" – language that somehow rang a bell from the newsletter blurb – and commented, "Maybe this is the year for Peter O'Toole, often nominated, but never a winner."

That movie in the newsletter had Peter O'Toole in it?! Why didn't it say that? This was so surprising there could have been some momentary language. But instead I was just speechless.

Maybe it's just my family, but I grew up thinking Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the Founding Fathers.

Landscape design was as standard a topic of our dinner-table conversation as politics is in other families.

As a teenager I took it for granted that family car trips always involved running commentary and critiques by my mother and my brother of the landscaping of whatever houses or public spaces we happened to drive by. It never struck me as odd until one day when I had a friend along. As we got out of the car for a pit stop, she pulled me aside to ask, "Do they do this all the time?"

And so I tend to have my antennae out for landscape – as a wordsmith, if not as a gardener. And I've been noticing how "scape" clauses seem to be proliferating, both in number and in meaning, in the language.

Landscape was originally a term of art – in two senses: a technical term, and one used by painters. It meant a painting showing inland scenery, rather than a view of the sea, or a portrait. The word was borrowed from Dutch, and given how many times Dutch artists painted the sea, they perhaps felt scenes of terra firma needed their own designation.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded use of this sense of landscape goes back to 1598. Two centuries later, seascape made its appearance. Half a century after that, we got cityscape. In 1856 William Thackeray wrote of "a fairyland of frozen land, river, and city-scape." Most of Oxford's cityscape citations are mid-20th century, though.

A contemporary review of a 1960 novel described it as "a cityscape, a rich Dickensian evocation of a decaying, badly blitzed suburb."

"Scape," as a suffix, comes from the Anglo-Saxon side of English. It's related to the "ship" of "friendship" or "hardship" or "scholarship." This ship is not necessarily nautical, but is a suffix related to shape – it comes from a verb meaning to form or create.

Of all these "scapes," landscape is the only one that has a life as a verb, going back to 1927. And in the field of landscaping – the gerund derived from the verb – the term  hardscape is in use to refer to paving stones, brick walls, and other features of a landscaped space, as distinct from softscape – the actual plants that make it a garden.

Organizational guru David Allen of "Getting Things Done" fame has popularized the use of hardscape to refer to the firm commitments on one's calendar (the weekly staff meeting, etc.), as distinct from the things that can be moved around. He and his devotees also speak of their "projects landscapes." (My own projects landscape often looks more like an overgrown wilderness than a well-tended garden, alas.)

"Hard" and "soft" are only the beginning. There are several other "scapes" each with multiple meanings: "Mindscape" is the name of a band, a British software publisher, a Web developer in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a sci-fi novel.

There's a similar embarrassment of riches for ideascape. One gets the impression that someone has thought of it in each of the English-speaking countries, and snared it for a domain name. There's bodyscape, too.

At a nittier-grittier level, there's streetscape, one of my favorites; roofscape, cloudscape, a term used in art as well as photography; moonscape, winterscape, and even junglescape.

Some may wonder whether escape fits into this family of words (e-scape? the landscape of the online universe?) But no. The hidden word in escape is "cape."

Escape is rooted in the idea of getting away and leaving one's pursuer with only one's cape – rather like the biblical Joseph in Egypt, leaving his garment behind as he flees the unwanted attentions of Mrs. Potiphar.