"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.

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.

Some weeks ago I was copy-editing a magazine article – a lifestyle feature on young families in the suburbs who were spiffing up their backyards with the help of a local landscaper.

One of the backyards was said to afford a "killer view" of the skyline of the major city nearby.

Hmm, I thought. "'A killer view'?" After years of training at the Monitor, I find it's second nature to question gratuitous violence in an article, even rhetorical violence. And after all, this is a lifestyle feature, not a report on the Mahdi Army.

Let's make it a "stunning view," instead, I thought.

Well, I should have heard the cliché police stirring in the bushes and ready to jump at that one.

My own editorial musings continued along another track, however: "Stunning" has long meant "strikingly beautiful." But what's the metaphor behind it? More violence! Someone takes after someone else with a club and clobbers 'em. Now that's a lovely bit of mental imagery, is it not?

But has the word turned, or tipped – reached the point where the literal sense of clobbering has given way to an extended meaning? A quick check of dictionaries suggests that the clobbering sense of "stunning" is holding its own.

Here's the first of the "quick definitions" for "stunning" at onelook.com:

Causing or capable of causing bewilderment or shock or insensibility (Example: "Laid the poor fellow senseless with one stunning blow")

The second definition is "causing great consternation or astonishment." "Strikingly beautiful or attractive" comes only third. It's a usage that goes back to the middle of the 19th century, but some dictionaries nonetheless tag it as "colloquial." And the online version of Webster's 1913 dictionary labels it "slang."

Its first definition of "stunning," though, is, "Overpowering consciousness; overpowering the senses; especially, overpowering the sense of hearing; confounding with noise."

An earlier antique Webster, the 1828 Dictionary, similarly stresses the audio aspect of being "stunned." One usage example it cites is this: "To prevent being stunned, cannoneers sometimes fill their ears with wool."

You have to wonder what the 19th-century canoneers would have said about all the kids on the subway today with little white wires coming out of their ears. Maybe in the 21st century, people like being knocked silly.

But hold on a bit - what about that "strikingly," modifying "beautiful," anyway? Once I've started down this path, I have to acknowledge that it's another bit of verbal violence. Biff! Bam! Kapow!

Sometimes we're "struck" not just by someone's good looks, which can have a literal aspect to it, as when a young man distracted by a pretty girl walks into a telephone pole. Sometimes we're struck by an idea. "I was struck by the thought that I should call him back right away." Or, "It suddenly hit me that it would be cheaper to move there than to keep commuting."

A visitor from another planet may well wonder what’s up with people who get into punching matches with their own thoughts. But it can happen, apparently.

A few weeks ago an item moved across the news wire about a South Carolina man arrested by local police. It seems he'd gotten into an altercation with some shrubbery. Given that shrubs almost never punch first, I have to think the initial affront was all in the man's imagination.

Another innocuous expression that has a fair bit of force concealed behind a mild-mannered appearance is the phrasal preposition "by dint of," meaning "by means of." I think I first encountered it in one of the "Anne of Green Gables" books in seventh grade or so and picked up the meaning from context.

But while on another mission in the "D" section of the dictionary the other day, I ran across "dint," the noun, and found that its literal sense packs quite a punch. It means blow, or stroke, or force of assault. It's related to the "dent" you put in your car. It pops up in idioms like "by dint of sword" – that is, by force of arms, we would say today. Not very Anne of Green Gablesish, if you ask me.

"Dint" is also a term, albeit a quaint one, to refer to thunderbolts. Sir Walter Scott, in his poem "Marmion" (1808), wrote of "The Mount, where Israel heard the law 'mid thunder-dint."

And whatever happened to the "killer view"? On a subsequent rewrite, it became a "million-dollar view." It was a sensible solution. Nonviolent, and reasonably fresh. Even though a million dollars isn't what it used to be – despite a real estate slump.

Clarity and simplicity are such important values in the public discourse that any journalist, whether writer or editor, must be always alert for blather, obfuscation, or new words introduced to camouflage bad deeds.

Forgive me if I state the obvious. Or sound hopelessly idealistic.

The Bible records the Lord urging the prophet Habakkuk, "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it." At least one commentary I've looked at to interpret this passage left me with a mental image of robed figures (in running sandals?) jogging through the desert past a series of billboards with the prophetic message in ALL CAPS. But I think that may not be quite what the writer, or the Lord, for that matter, had in mind.

Rather, the idea is that a writer's words should be clear and smooth enough that the reader's eyes should be able to run over the page (table). Euphemism and obfuscation are like potholes or tree roots in a runner's path.

In his essay in the current National Geographic on the world's national parks under threat, David Quammen has alerted me to a significant new pothole in the path of public discourse: the term "de-gazetting." It refers to the process by which a park is "disestablished," so to speak, or "de-listed" – downgraded to a lesser level of protection. It happened to the Amboseli National Park in Kenya last year.

De-gazetting, Quammen writes, is "a word with which we should all acquaint ourselves; it's a word, unfortunately, of the future. How so? Because other efforts to de-gazette national parks are likely to arise soon, as we citizens of various countries find our short-term appetites more compelling than our long-term ideals."

And where does this curious word come from? From "gazette" in the sense of "official journal," roughly analogous to the Congressional Record in the United States. In the case of the Amboseli National Park, the minister of wildlife and tourism announced that it would be downgraded to a national reserve and control of it returned to the Maasai people, its original owners.

This change was effected, without any consultation, by way of a published notice in the Kenya Gazette. "De-gazetting" made me think of "deaccessioning," which is how museums refer to "selling" or perhaps "unloading" the less significant works in their collections, or those less clearly related to their mission.

"Deaccessioning" popped onto the public radar during the tenure (1967-1977) of Thomas Hoving as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The American Association of Museums has lots to say about "deaccessioning" and why it's often the best way to deal with a particular object.

But it's a controversial concept – as reflected even in the example sentence offered by my online dictionary:

He also denied that... friends of the museum were permitted to buy... pieces that were deaccessioned (New York Times).

But back to "gazette." Does it have anything to do with "gazing"? Short answer: apparently not. "Gazette" has been used in English to mean a newspaper since 1605. It goes back through French and proper Italian to a bit of Venetian dialect – "gazeta," meaning originally a small copper coin and, by the mid-1500s, the monthly government newspaper this little coin could buy. The coin itself was literally a "little magpie" ("gazza," plus a diminutive ending).

Lexicographers seem uncertain whether "gazette" in its various forms as a name for a publication derives strictly from the coin or perhaps reflects an association with magpies and "false chatter," as my Online Etymology Dictionary suggests.

Whatever, "gazette" lives on both in the names of official publications, such as the Kenya Gazette, and a range of ordinary independent newspapers – two honorable strains of public discourse through which the reader should be able to "run."

I don't like to see the word morphed into a term for official subterfuge, or government management by stealth. And I don't think the magpies would approve either.

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.

A colleague has invited my attention to a little bit of recent kvetching by a New York Times technology writer about the funny way airline staff talk:

"We do ask that you remain seated..." "We do anticipate touching down on time..." "We do realize that you do have a choice in travel carriers..."

What's with that? Every one of those sentences would work better without the "do." It's as though they're arguing a point that nobody has actually challenged. Are they just so bored with those speeches that they feel compelled to insert random words just for variety?

As a collective verbal tic of a whole industry, airline-speak goes beyond needless emphatic verb forms (e.g., "we do realize" instead of the simpler "we realize"). It extends to time-filling verbosities ("We will be starting the boarding process," instead of "We will board), peculiarities of intonation (especially odd stresses on prepositions, as in "Welcome to the Boston area), and the overgeneralized, all-things-to-all-people locutions such as "Welcome to the Boston area, or wherever your final destination happens to be," as if someone has just remembered all those folks looking to make the last flight to Bangor, Maine, tonight.

And then there are those instructions on how to buckle a seat belt, evidently intended for passengers who arrived at the airport by oxcart.

I think I know why airline staff talk like this: They're in an industry that combines the glamorous and the monotonous, an industry that grew up under heavy government regulation, right down to the scripted safety announcements. Cabin crews have a lot to think about as they prepare for takeoff, and it surely must help them to have their spiels memorized.

And yet I understand why airline-speak bugs the Times writer. It bugs me, too. It bugs me to hear language on autopilot. We call it rattling off a spiel, but "spiel" is rooted in playfulness; how did it come to be the word for insincerity, of body here and mind elsewhere?

This kind of disengaged language should not be part of the soundscape of travel.

The stationmaster's voice calling "All aboard!" as we hop onto the train is, on the other hand, an example of words that really move us. So is "Step lively!" which a lifelong New Yorker of my acquaintance remembers as a byword of the subway rides of his youth. And how could anyone who has ever traveled the London Underground forget to "mind the gap"?

"Doors closing" is the signal to passengers of the Metro system in Washington, D.C., to get a move on. The Metro has a new voice as of this month – Randi Miller of Woodbridge, Va., who won the Doors Closing 2006 contest. Sometimes such "talents" acquire a certain specialized local celebrity. The distinctive voice announcing "Welcome to the transportation corridor" was long a clear audio signal that one had arrived at the Atlanta airport, with its nifty little subway system.

In 1985, William E. Geist of The New York Times profiled Daniel Simmons, the voice of New York's Penn Station:

Many of the people passing through shout requests. ''A big favorite,'' said Virginia Keeler, who works in the information booth, ''is The Crescent. A lot of people ask for that one.'' The Crescent is a train to New Orleans and Los Angeles, and the fans delight in hearing Mr. Simmons rhythmically rattle off the 27 stops between New York and New Orleans - with the p's popping, the r's trilling and the t's snapping.

You really have to be there to appreciate Mr. Simmons's snappy, syncopated ''All aboard.'' He pauses after the train's last destination and takes a breath before leaping on the first ''a'' in ''all,'' holding it for a while, then lingering on the double l's. He then attacks the first ''a'' in ''aboard,'' holds the ''o'' for the longest time and bites the word off at the end: ''Haaallll haaboooo-wit!'' It packs a wallop, and sometimes sets patrons of the adjacent Nedicks restaurant to running out with napkins flying.

Sometimes those engaged voices of the road are reassuring rather than energizing, though. Once upon a time, I found myself scheduled to make a complete circuit of the state of Wyoming alone by car during  January.

One evening I had a particularly long drive from the northwest corner of the rectangular state down to the southwest corner. Mercifully, the weather was clear , but the road was only one way in either direction, the roadside snowbanks were as tall as I was, with no shoulder, and the only lights were on the front of my car.

As I fiddled with the radio for company, I started picking up stations from across the country – Lincoln, Neb., then the Twin Cities. I heard the closing report of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. And then I happened to pick up the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, whose traffic reports had been part of the soundscape of my childhood 20 years before. It was like time travel. I even recognized the names of some of the reporters. And the Harbor Freeway was congested. Just like old times.

As I made my way through the lonely winter landscape, the idea that somewhere, miles and miles away, traffic jams were happening in all the old familiar places was comforting. The words coming out of that radio were just what I needed to move me along.

It's amazing how a new term for a familiar concept, if introduced in a new context, can drive a familiar old term completely out of consciousness.

So it was when I moved to Toronto and was introduced to "eavestroughing." Though I'd never heard it before, I immediately understood what it meant. And then I realized that this new word had immediately overwritten whatever American English word had been there in my vocabulary before. Eventually I figured it out: "Eavestroughing" – the troughs attached to the eaves of a house – is Canadian for what Americans call rain gutters, or roof gutters.

I had a similar moment a couple of weeks ago with ready-to-finish furniture.

Hunh? Isn't that what we used to call "unfinished furniture," that is to say, furniture structurally complete but unpainted, lacking a "finish," in the sense that my friends at OneLook.com helpfully provide: "a decorative texture or appearance of a surface (or the substance that gives it that appearance)."

For example: "The boat had a metallic finish."

The same little trip into the Land of Home Improvement (Improvistan?) also introduced me to "ready to assemble" furniture. This term is applied to pieces of furniture that are not really furniture at all, but rather cartons of pieces of wood and woodlike substances that have the potential for becoming furniture, as long as the accompanying screws and other hardware are present as promised on the dopesheet, and the whole package is stumbled upon by someone whose skills in this area exceed, for instance, mine.

"Ready to assemble" is an adjectival phrase doing the work often done by the elliptical clause, "Some assembly required" – an understated locution that can strike fear into human hearts. Time was when you could even get a mail-order house from Sears, Roebuck. True, that parts list was a killer, but those kits opened the way to homeownership for many who could not have otherwise afforded it.

"Ready to assemble" follows on analogy with "ready to wear," the once novel concept of clothing bought off the rack of a store, or ordered out of a catalogue like Montgomery Ward's, rather than made to order by a tailor or dressmaker, or made at home from a pattern and fabric purchased at the local dry-goods store. The phrase "ready to wear" was pushed into the language by manufacturers, eager to expand their markets, as a more socially acceptable spin on "not custom made."

What do we make of this "readiness"? It is marketing-speak, and it's also a quintessentially American euphemism - recasting a negative (more work for you, O do-it-yourselfer) into an opportunity: your choice of finish, your option of paying less by doing the assembly yourself.

This mind-set apparently has let Ford Motor Company present a layoff of 30,000 employees as part of a corporate restructuring plan it's calling "The Way Forward." Those departing are, let's hope, "ready to employ" elsewhere, if not genuinely ready to retire.

By this same logic, I suppose, a building razed to the ground by fire leaves a lot "ready to rebuild." And so in fact it happens, in forests, on prairies, and in big cities: A major fire is often the impetus of renewal and growth.

I can't help thinking that, in the famous novel by Mark Twain, what Tom Sawyer was really doing was providing his friends with an opportunity - a fence "ready to whitewash."

And what an opportunity it was. As he asked his friend Ben, "Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," Henry David Thoreau is widely reported to have said.

Beware of government policies that require new words, I would add.

That may be a bit adamant. But my antennae go up whenever government officials introduce a new polysyllabic Latin-derived term to describe a new policy or sanitize an old one. Many of my favorite words come from Latin. But using long words whose meanings are less than instantly clear can be an effective way of fogging-in the harbor of public discourse.

Remember when "rendition" was what one gave of a song, for instance? "She blew them all away with her rendition of 'Over the Rainbow.'"

Now we're hearing about "extraordinary rendition," which is the Bush administration's preferred term for kidnapping suspected terrorists in foreign countries, and then transporting them to other countries where they remain under the control of US officials but lack the legal protections they would have on US soil.

Last week Salman Rushdie wrote,

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language in 2005 was ''extraordinary rendition.''

An interim report released this week by the Council of Europe reported more than 100 cases of such renditions. Although it found no clear evidence of a network of secret detention centers being run with the acquiescence of European governments, as has been alleged, it did say that the situation warrants further investigation.

"Rendition" is a noun from the verb "to render," which derives from Latin, meaning "to give back." The "performance" sense of rendition is a relatively new usage, originally an Americanism. Presumably the underlying metaphor or image is of "delivery" in a sense, as we speak of "delivering" a speech. Earlier meanings had to do with "surrender," as of a fort or garrison, or of a person. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an example from the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1860: "the rendition of fugitive slaves by the Northern States." Not anyone's finest hour, that.

Euphemisms have their uses at times. "Quarantine," for instance, is a public-health term rooted in a biblical-sounding concept of 40 ("quarante" in French) days apart. But during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President Kennedy announced a "naval quarantine" of Cuba. A "blockade" would have been an act of war under international law. The status of a "quarantine" was less clear.

Thirty-five years later, Kennedy's aide Theodore Sorensen acknowledged that the blockade was described as a quarantine "to make it sound less belligerent." The term let the president take action without taking the irreversible step of going to war. Euphemism gave the president a little room to maneuver at a time when hard-liners within his circle of advisers were calling for a nuclear strike.

It's hard to make a similar defense of "rendition" in this new sense. I’m remembering how the phrase "ethnic cleansing" first entered into the public conversation a dozen or so years ago. It seemed like a ghastly irony at first – how can anyone miss the point that one "cleanses" something of dirt or a stain; and how can an entire people be dismissed as a stain? And then somehow "ethnic cleansing" simply became the term for what earlier generations called genocide, or mass murder.

Maybe we should be more forthright about using the term "kidnapping." This is a perfectly respectable standard word whose colloquial roots are all too evident. The word comes from "kid" as in "child," and "nab" as in seize, arrest, etc. "The cops nabbed 'em as they were making their getaway." The first kidnappers were looking to steal children as servants, farm laborers, cabin boys on ships.

The term has long since been extended to abductions of adults. If "kidnap" is just too uncomfortably vivid and Anglo-Saxon, maybe that's a sign that it's exactly the right word.

What do you call an ad hominem attack when it's made against a woman?

That’s the question that popped into my mind the other day when I read a reader comment e-mail taking issue with a story by one of the women on our staff.

The message didn't discuss ideas or facts. Its tone was acid and the criticisms intensely personal, and directed to my colleague specifically as a woman.

Almost all reader comment can be useful to a news organization, and most of us learn more from our critics than our flatterers. But in this case I responded, "This message is beyond the pale of civil discourse and is being deleted."

What's happening to the national conversation in America? Why are so many people screaming?

Do people say things on a recorded message or an e-mail form that they wouldn't say face to face with another live human being? Similarly, do political actors say things of their opponents that they wouldn't otherwise, because their real audience is the 24/7 news cycle?

This is a time of national soul-searching; we are caught in a war in Iraq, and it's not clear how we will get out. Many people are frightened, angry, or dismayed – perhaps because they see an administration in Washington that has lost its compass, or because they feel those pesky liberal media just won't give the president credit for any of the good that is going on.

We've seen Rep. Jack Murtha (D) of Pennsylvania break down in tears as he called for withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date."

We've heard Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) of Ohio booed off the House floor for insinuating that Mr. Murtha was a coward who would "cut and run," and now we read that she's apologized.

We've seen much of the president's trip to Asia last week consumed with damage control, and then damage control for the damage control. The White House staff at some point realized that comparing Murtha, a decorated former marine and staunch advocate of the military, to "ultraliberal" filmmaker Michael Moore was too risible to be an effective response to Murtha's call for an exit strategy.

As of Monday morning, both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney are back on the high road of commending Murtha's character, even as they dispute him on policy. Whew.

Reality check: Washington hasn't yet fallen back to the low point it reached on May 22, 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the chamber of the just-adjourned US Senate and beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a passionate voice against slavery, into unconsciousness. The Senate website provides an interesting detail:

If [Brooks] had believed Sumner to be a gentleman, he might have challenged him to a duel. Instead, he chose a light cane of the type used to discipline unruly dogs.

Sumner himself seems to have been not exactly a model of parliamentary decorum. Brooks's physical attack was evidently a response to Sumner's rhetorical attack on his uncle, Sen. Andrew Butler, also of South Carolina, and Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, two Democrats whom Sumner identified as chief culprits in the efforts to bring Kansas into the union as a slave state.

According to the Senate website, Sumner "characterized Douglas to his face as a 'noise-some, squat, and nameless animal … not a proper model for an American senator.'"

It would take a while after the Civil War for public discourse to get back to the level Abraham Lincoln suggested in his Second Inaugural: "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Here in the 21st century, I've taken comfort by a commentary by James Carroll in The Boston Globe, on yet another aspect of our public conversation – the revelations of Bob Woodward's connection to the Valerie Plame identity leak scandal. Carroll reminded me why journalism, and the public conversation for which it provides the vehicle, matter so much:

The free press is an absolute value not only because the unfettered flow of information is essential to the republican system, nor only because the fourth estate serves as a check on the power of the other three, but because public expression is necessary for the communal self-awareness that keeps the body politic alive.

And meanwhile – how do you say "ad hominem" (literally, "to the man") when you are referring to a woman? Some experts stoutly maintain that the neologism is unnecessary, because the "man" in this sense is generic; that is, better translated for moderns as "person." Others say there's a need for a specific feminine form, and the locution that seems to be catching on is ad feminam. And that would have been the way to characterize the blast from our uncivil reader.

Do you remember solons?

When I was a kid, it seemed I was always running across newspaper headlines that said things like "Solons slated to meet."

It should have been enough to discourage me from venturing forth into the "grownup" sections of the paper. I should have stuck with the comics and the box scores. (If a newspaper is like a city, the comics and the sports pages are like the immigrant neighborhoods, where newcomers establish a toehold.)

I suspect I wasn't the only one who didn't get "solons."

Eventually I found out that Solon was the statesman and lawgiver who gave the Athenians their constitution. And lowercased generic "solon" is a highfalutin way of saying "legislator."

But – here's the clincher – it's a five-letter word for "legislator," and one of the letters is "l," which takes almost no space at all. That made "solon" beloved in newsrooms where time and space were tight. "Slated," of course, was a six-letter synonym for "scheduled." Who could resist, even if nobody was writing on slate anymore, even back then? (Nowadays, "Slate" is the name of a hip online journal.)

"Solons slated to meet" was a bit of vintage headlinese that probably topped a story on a meeting of something like the budget committee of the state legislature, or maybe an important session of a congressional committee in Washington. It sounds rather quaint in part because newspapers don't run play-by-play stories like that anymore.

But I've been thinking about "solons" lately, because it's useful to remember that the time and space pressures that we see squeezing the language today are older than your cellphone or your BlackBerry.

Before there were flying thumbs punching messages into the tiny keyboards of hand-held computers, there were forceful forefingers hunting and pecking their way across the keyboards of manual typewriters.

Long before you ever typed "btw, r u going 2 see me l8r?" into your cellphone, copy editors had glommed onto "panel" as a all-purpose synonym for "committee," and foreign editors were communicating with far-flung correspondents via cables as succinct – and sometimes as cryptic – as fortune-cookie fortunes. People wrote in "cablese" because cables were so expensive: Forty cents a word to Tokyo is the figure I have seared into memory from my own days on the Monitor's Asia desk in the early 1980s.

Headline writers from those days to the present have been grateful that English has so many short, punchy words, verbs especially:

• "Vandals vex vehicle owners"
• "Red Sox blast Rangers"
• "N.W. utilities hail energy act"
• "Admiral's comments about submarine base irk local congressmen"

OK, so this last has a number of long words, but you can't beat "irk" as a concise verb.

There's even "mull"; we might call it an "inaction" verb. But at least it's only four letters, two of them that skinny "l" again.

The ultimate here may well be the famous headline in Variety, on a story about how rural America disapproved of Hollywood's take on country living: "Hix Nix Stix Pix."

There's such a thing as being too concise, though. Jim Barger of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette counsels,

Don't write a headline you wouldn't say when talking to a friend. No one in history ever uttered, "Woodley, defense propel Dolphins past NY."

It's interesting to note how the conventions of language on the Web are taking a slightly different turn from those of newspapers. Articles and conjunctions – those little words that have long been allowed to drop out of headlines to save space, as in Barger's ridiculous example – turn out to contribute a lot to the smoothness of the reading experience.

This is especially important online, where the visual clues of a newspaper (photos, section headings, logos, etc.) may be absent. Leaving the little words out can make for prose as herky-jerky as a silent movie, without the reader's quite understanding why. Since Web pages don't operate under quite the same kind of space constraints ("geometry" as we call it in the Monitor newsroom) as the printed page of a newspaper, however, they have that little bit of extra space that allows them to include "the" and "a" and "an" and "and."

They're just little words, but just like the air in the pneumatic tires, they help smooth out the ride.

Reports of the demise of the global war on terror (GWOT to those in the know, both hawks and doves) are greatly exaggerated.

So insists US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In an address in Texas this week, he denied that the Bush administration is backing away from GWOT in favor of "the global struggle against violent extremism" as the preferred term for well, you know, all this stuff that keeps happening.

The Dallas Morning News quoted him thus:

Some ask, are we still engaged in a war on terror? Let there be no mistake about it. It’s a war.

Last week, Rumsfeld was a key figure in a New York Times story that asserted:

The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, according to senior administration and military officials.

The authors of the article triangulated from a Rumsfeld speech the previous week, in which he had used the kinder, gentler language, and a July 25 address to the National Press Club by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then after checking with some other sources, the Times reporters concluded that "global war on terror" was on its way out as the administration's "catchphrase of choice."

Is this change a concession to defeat – or evidence of the administration tuning in to reality? Are they lowering the bar? Moving the goalposts? Are they – to play off Daniel Moynihan's phrase about crime rates – defining militancy downward?

President Bush himself has wandered off-message on "terror" before. Almost a year ago, in an interview broadcast during the Republican National Convention, for heaven's sake, he called the GWOT "unwinnable."

The blogosphere has certainly wasted no time in asserting that this latest shift in terminology represented, at the very least, a quest for a more upbeat acronym. "GSAVE" surely looks better. "Gee, save us, too." On the other hand, "GWOT" all but invites the teasing query, "GWOT's next?" And the answer it seems to invite is, alas, "Jihad."

But as words rather than initials, "global war on terror," a steady drumbeat of three trochaic feet (DA-da, DA-da, DA-da) beats "global struggle against violent extremism" all get-out.

"Global struggle against violent extremism" does not fall trippingly off the tongue – does not have a beat you can dance to – or march to.

(For a fascinating discussion of the nitty-gritty of how marching in formation, in rhythm, builds military esprit de corps, see William H. McNeill's "Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History." He used the term "muscular bonding" to describe the phenomenon. He posits that long after formations of infantrymen firing in rhythm in set-piece battles ceased to be important as a military tactic, the bonding that military drilling produced remained important psychologically. But I digress.)

"Struggle," to be fair, does not deserve to be tarred with the charge of euphemism. If "struggle" were a garment, it would be made of sturdy stuff, with reinforced seams and leather patches and worn spots, and probably a tang of sweat. Struggle shares with "strive" and "strength" and "strenuous" and any number of other words, some related and some not, an energetic burst of initial consonants. The "blunt" short "u," the hard "g," and the "le" particle that often signifies repeated action over time. (Compare "crack" and "crackle.") Struggle is an honorable word that sounds like what it means.

Cataclysmic events like wars are often described one way as they occur and another way as they are put into the history books. Journalists, writing the first draft of history, often hold back on capitalizing, on formalizing a conflict until the dust has settled. The war in Iraq, or Iraq war, remains lowercased in our pages and those of other publications. Ditto the war in Afghanistan.

By what name or names will our grandchildren and great-grandchildren know the conflicts of the early years of the 21st century? World War I was originally known as the Great War, although, as Richard Armour quipped in "It All Started With Europa," if they had started numbering earlier, it might have been something like World War CCCLXXXVII.

It's tempting to play the Retreat From GWOT for laughs, but I can't help remembering an exchange between President Kennedy and Gen. Curtis LeMay during the Cuban missile crisis, as the United States and the Soviet Union came as close as they ever came to nuclear war. The general said, "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President." The president shot back, "You're in there with me."

In the movie "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin played a factory worker so used to the repetitive actions demanded of him on the assembly line that even off-duty, he involuntarily went through the motions.

An off-duty copy editor may be Chaplin's Information Age counterpart: I've always got my antennae up for misspelled words and usages that are not quite right.

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a magazine reference to "Holland."

I immediately thought "'Holland' is usually wrong and ought to be replaced with 'the Netherlands,'" and was reaching reflexively for my red pen when I saw it was a reference to Holland, Mich., which, even were I on duty, I wouldn't need to change. (A colleague of mine has a term for people who work on autopilot like this: "search-and-replace editors.")

The Dutch referendum on the European Constitution last week has meant that "Holland" has been much in the news lately. As I pondered the really big questions such as, "Are Europeans turning their back on further continental integration?" I found myself also wondering, "How come so many people who ought to know better are calling it 'Holland' instead of 'the Netherlands'?"

Editing is often the point at which the irresistible push for shorter, simpler ways of saying things meets the immovable object of the need for standards, accuracy, and precision.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to say "Holland"? Lots of people do – but not quite correctly. There is no such place on a contemporary map. Holland was a county in the Holy Roman Empire. Today North Holland and South Holland are two provinces of the constitutional monarchy now properly known as the Netherlands. And we editors can't pretend we don't know this stuff. Darn!

Similarly, I wish we could get more use out of "Ulster." A splendid little six-letter word, it's often used to mean "Northern Ireland" – the six counties of the Emerald Isle that are part of the United Kingdom, rather than the Republic of Ireland. "Ulster" is shorter than "Northern Ireland" and makes for less cumbersome compounds. But it's not politically correct, alas. "Ulster" was one of the traditional provinces of Ireland – back in the day when the whole island was "united" under British rule. Its nine counties include three that are today in the Republic. Thus Ulster does not = Northern Ireland.

"Holland" has been on my mental map since the days of nursery-school tales of yellow-haired children who wore wooden shoes and lived in windmills. But at some point – learning in school about the Pilgrims' stopover in Leiden on their way to the New World, perhaps? - I picked up the message that "the Netherlands" was the better term.

"Nether" turned out to be an ordinary English word meaning "lower" (all those dikes and polders!), but for extra credit, we found out that "the Low Countries" is a little trio consisting of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, who have combined and separated and combined again throughout history like the colored shards in a kaleidoscope. These three are also known by the beneficent and luxurious, if also somewhat soapy-sounding, name of the Benelux countries; as such they were a precursor of today's European Union. (The Gray and Damp Countries are somewhere nearby, perhaps across the Channel; Pastaland is to the south.)

The people of the Netherlands are sometimes called Netherlanders but more usually designated as "Dutch," which literally means "German" (compare "Deutsch"). The Pennsylvania Dutch are in fact of German and Swiss descent, as their visitors generally find out sooner or later. And "Dutchman" turns out to be slang in the Western United States to refer to a man of German ancestry. Go figure. In the building trades, a "dutchman," lowercase, refers to "a piece or wedge inserted to hide the fault in a badly made joint, to stop an opening, etc." Now go figure that one. And it gets worse. Politically correct it's not.

Sometimes political correctness and simplicity of language coincide. The European Community has become the European Union. Reunification has let us exchange East and West Germany for "Germany." The Soviet Union dissolved, and it was once again OK to speak simply of Russia and the Russians. Whew.

And not to minimize the continuing challenges among the developing democracies (or not-so-democratic states) within the former USSR, but it's hard to argue that a swap that lets us unload "the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic" in favor of the simplicity of "Belarus" is a bad deal.

A reader has written in to take issue with the use in the Monitor's columns of that venerable cliché of journalism, "the carrot and the stick."

It's generally taken to mean "rewards and punishments," and is often used to describe the approach (cf. that other venerable cliché, "two-pronged approach") one nation takes to trying to modify the behavior of another. At the moment Iran getting such treatment from the United States and Europe, which are concerned.about Tehran's nuclear ambitions. As they say, one nuclear bomb can spoil your whole day.

Against this background, Gentle Reader writes,

In this metaphor the stick is NEVER intended to be a symbol of castigation. The 'stick' is part of the tool which involves using a stick and a length of string to which a carrot is tied. This whole apparatus is used to hold the carrot just out of reach of a domesticated animal in order to entice it to move forward. Of course, since as the animal steps forward the "prize" moves forward in relation to its movements, the carrot is always just out of reach.

No wonder the Iranians are ticked. Our reader continues,

[Your writer] makes the same mistake that thousands of other people who grew up in the US make. He confuses the "carrot and stick" metaphor with the comment attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

If our reader is right that "carrot and stick" is widely misunderstood, the problem is not confined to the United States. In publications outside the US "carrot and stick" treatment is being applied not only to Iran but in India and the Balkans, as well, to cite but a few examples. TR would seem to cast a very long shadow indeed.

I think that what's happening here is that a familiar expression has completely slipped whatever moorings in reality it ever had and taken on a new life. After all, when was the last time you saw an actual live donkey?

The Word Detective, aka Evan Morris, supports our reader's view of "carrot and stick" working together as one. But curiously, he cites the Oxford English Dictionary, which, it seems to me, fuses the two interpretations of the phrase. He writes,

The Oxford English Dictionary seems to endorse the "reward and threat" interpretation, explaining the phrase as being "with allusion to the proverbial method of tempting a donkey to move by dangling a carrot before it … an enticement, a promised or expected reward; frequently contrasted with ‘stick’ (= punishment) as the alternative." Yet the earliest (1916) citation for the phrase listed by the OED seems to refer to a carrot dangling from a stick attached to and moving forward with the donkey itself."

However charming the idea of the dangling carrot, the "punishment vs. reward" interpretation is the one that seems to be meeting a need in public discourse just now. "Carrot and stick" is in that final phase of cliché-hood, when it still makes some pretense of being a clever expression, before congealing completely into a set phrase or idiom.

And as Miss Manners will tell you, there are reasons for some of the set phrases in our lives. There are times when we don't need to be clever or original, we just need to be present and sincere. Bully.

Since the Monitor ran the "Ramadan Diary" series this fall, I've become more aware of the new moon each month: Ramadan begins and ends with a new moon, and our Saudi stringer kept track of her weeks of fasting by watching the phases of the moon.

The same moon shines on Boston, too, and I've been noticing the new moon floating over Symphony Hall, as a silver sliver in the darkening blue evening sky as I drive home from work. Each day the sliver is a bit less slender. This is what is known as a waxing crescent. "Crescent" means "increasing," and these two words (from the Latin crescere, "to come forth," have cousins in the word "create" and its relatives.

Would that all metaphors for "increase" were as simple as the phases of the moon: It gets bigger, or it gets smaller. Lunar imagery doesn't drag in tangled metaphors of lighter-than-air craft, ballistics, or explosives.

Here in newspaperland, we're always in the market for more metaphors for increase, for growth, for having more of something. Not to give away any trade secrets or anything, but news reporting is often a matter of noticing what we seem to have more of (traffic, terrorism, cellphones, iPods) than we used to, and writing about that. (There is also a school of journalism focused on what we have less of – time, cheap oil, cellphone-free public spaces, civilized conversation – than we used to: Call it the waning moon school of reporting.)

It is on the waxing crescent side that we tend to get into trouble, however. We tend to equate "more" with "up," e.g., "Stuff costs more" = "Prices go up." And then the "up" metaphor takes on a life of its own – achieves liftoff, so to speak.

"Housing prices soar" is such a familiar turn of phrase that most people probably don't register it as a figure of speech anymore – although I'm just literal enough that it conjures up an image of hang gliders with big black numbers ("$275,000," "$675,000," "$2.3 mil or B.O.") painted on them, way up in the sky.

From numbers – e.g., prices – going up or down, we quickly move to things themselves going up or down. Thus not long ago this newspaper reported, "Households with five or more people have fallen by half since '70." I suspect we meant to say "the percentage of households…"

"Skyrocket," as a verb, is another vivid verb whose trajectory sometimes escapes the force of both Earth's gravity and logic. "Skyrocket" is what numbers of feral pigs in East Texas were recently reported to have done – although to be fair, I should stress that it was the numbers, and not the pigs themselves, that were said to have taken flight. Similarly, smoking in the movies is reported to have "skyrocketed." An increase in adultery in China was described in our pages this week thus: "Extramarital relations have skyrocketed."

But "explode" may – how shall I put it? – pack even more of a punch than "skyrocket." It's widely used, especially with regard to markets. This is unfortunate given how many times, alas, the news media have to report on an actual bomb in an actual market where people are shopping for food.

Nonetheless, in a dope-sheet on "how to improve your writing," readily available on the Web from one of our fine state universities, the following sentence appears: "Fortunately, DandyCorp. invested in chicken necks just before the poultry market exploded." The sentence is meant as an example of incorrect usage – failure to use the past perfect tense ("had invested"). But if you can read that bit without its bringing up a mental image of feathers flying everywhere, you're a better person than I am. (Maybe there really is a subject called "Ag English.")

My favorite, though, is from a commodities trading publication: "Cocoa exploded higher yesterday morning and left a massive gap on the daily charts."

Beware the mad chocolate bomber!

An observation during the closing weeks of this current presidential campaign: What a rich vocabulary the English language has for suggesting – without explicitly saying – that someone is lying.

That's "lying" as in "fibbing." Saying things that aren't so. Telling falsehoods with the intent to deceive. Practicing mendacity. Indulging in willful obfuscation. Prevarication. See what I mean?

"Lie," as a noun or a verb, is such a little word: a single syllable consisting of a liquid consonant and a diphthong – to use the phonetician's term for what we referred to in school as the "long i." The related noun, "liar," is almost as brief, one more unstressed syllable with another liquid consonant, "r," which in some dialects isn't even pronounced.

"Liar" is the kind of word one can utter under one's breath, or even let slip involuntarily.

And yet it is a deeply emotive word. A liar is what we are taught early on not to be. It's also a word we're taught to be very careful with in applying to others. And yet so many in the public square are being so selective with so-called "facts" that we're all starting to develop elaborate vocabularies to hold politicians and their spinmeisters to account without using the "L" word.

Politicians dare not hurl charges of "Liar, liar, pants on fire" across the partisan divide willy-nilly. Readers and viewers expect the mainstream media (is that term beginning to sound quaint or what?) to show "respect" for an incumbent president. Then the news organizations, in the interest of nonpartisanship, extend that courtesy to presidential challengers. (Chatroom types, talk-show callers-in, and for that matter most bloggers, have no such inhibitions, however – and no advertisers or corporate shareholders to please either).

There's a paradox at work here: intense polarization across an ideological spectrum that, in mainstream American politics, is fairly narrow. And all this polarization happens in a system that includes no mechanism for the head of government, the president, to face direct questions regularly from the public or their representatives, as a prime minister does during regular "question time " in parliament. Presidential press conferences are about as close as the American system gets to this, and they aren't very close.

The debates have provided abundant opportunity for parsing the nuances of mendacity, or what we might call accuracy deficits – such as the audio fact-checking that NPR offered after Wednesday night's debate. "Stretching the truth" is a locution that has been getting a workout of late: "Both Kerry and Bush stretched the truth at times," as The Washington Post and other papers reported. (Gotta love those "fair and balanced" headlines.)

"Exaggeration" is another useful item in the political lexicon. It's polysyllabic, as a lot of these fudge words are. This helps soften them, because even smart people have to think for a nanosecond about what they mean. And because you can't exaggerate something that isn't there in the first place, to decry an opponent's comment as an "exaggeration" is to concede that it has a nub of truth - not an utter lie. Presumably none of this, however, was going through the mind of President Bush Wednesday night when he denounced as an exaggeration the claim that he wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden.

There's another idiom apparently more common in British than American English, "to be economical with the truth." Here's something from the online edition of the British movie magazine Empire: "I've not seen the press coverage today, but I'll bet the pro-Kerry papers have a picture of Bush looking goofy and the pro-Bush papers have a picture of Kerry looking shifty, both of which prove the camera can, and does, lie all the time. Well, if not lie, at least be 'economical with the truth."

(Note: "I've not seen." An American would have said "I haven't seen.")

"Mislead" is an interesting stealth proxy for "lie." Because it's often used to refer to giving someone an inadvertent bum steer ("I may have misled you when I told you that store is open late on Thursdays; I hear they've just changed their hours"), it's much "softer" than "lie." But it contains the suggestion of "leading badly," which has particular zing when directed at a politician. But this can backfire when overused, especially by another politician. "Senator Kerry, Why Are You Always 'Misled?' " is the headline on one conservative rant, er, commentary out there. Note to politicians, actual and aspiring, everywhere: Be careful about letting yourself become the subject of a passive verb.

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.

Last week the case was made here that the English language needs a better term for "illegal immigrants." Now I'd like to add another item to the wish list: We need a better term for "nongovernmental organizations," or NGOs.

If migrants - legal or otherwise - are the independent foot-soldiers of the global mobilization, NGOs are armies of another kind. Stalin famously asked of the pope, "How many divisions has he got?" Today's NGOs don't necessarily have any allegiance to the pope – but they certainly represent a challenge to the kind of power that Stalin embodied.

If the press and the lobbyists are the unofficial fourth and fifth branches, respectively, of the American government, NGOs are the lobbyists of the international agenda. Indeed, groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines often set the international agenda. An outfit like the International Crisis Group in Brussels is the institutional home for leading discussants of hot spots (or ought-to-be-hotter spots) like Indonesia or Sudan.

And yet we refer to these groups generically by a term that tells us mostly what they are not.

Is there a term in the language that is more beige? Let's start with the noun first: "Organization" is not a term to make anyone's heart beat faster, except for possibly the heart of an organizational psychologist about to ink a lucrative consulting contract. Then consider "governmental." If "governmental," with its short vowels and liquid consonants, has any music to it at all, it's – at best – the sound of an orderly file drawer being pushed shut with a satisfying clunk.

"Nongovernmental" is even worse – it's beyond beige, into a sort of gray-beige. I want to say "ultra