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.

Anyone who thinks it's a bad idea to have the marble ceiling in the House of Representatives broken is keeping quiet about it.

The high point, by bipartisan consensus, of the President Bush's State of the Union address last week was his gracious opening:

[T]onight, I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own – as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker.

It turns out there's a particular, albeit obscure, term for this. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "madam" can be not only a noun but also a transitive verb, sometimes with "up." It cites a line from Samuel Richardson's 1741 novel "Pamela": "In came the coachman…and madamed me up strangely." Mr. Bush did his madaming live on national television.

And aren't we glad we didn't have to have a discussion whether it should be "Ms. Speaker" or "Mrs. Speaker"? "Madam" covers all possible marital statuses.

The US House practice of addressing the Speaker (hitherto) as "Mr. Speaker" follows the usage of the British House of Commons. There's something appealingly plain-clothes, plain-spoken about this use of "Mr." After all, it's the House of Commons.

And in that chamber, members representing places with names like Wellingborough or Chipping Barnet, refer to one another as "the honorable gentleman" or (nowadays increasingly) "the honorable lady."

This chamber has known a "Madam Prime Minister," too: Margaret Thatcher. That phrase worked its way into the title of one of her biographies – and into bios of Indira Gandhi of India and Gro Harlem Bruntland of Norway too.

Golda Meir of Israel, to name the other name that has to be mentioned in this group, was formally addressed as "Madam Prime Minister" when she visited Richard Nixon's White House in 1969. The one who beat all of these redoubtable women to the punch as the world's first female prime minister was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka.

And in Liberia it's "Madam President" Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

All these examples point to “madam” as a way to refer to the woman in charge, not just the lady of the house but the lady of the House. And I hope this trail of accomplished women will erase associations of "madam" with other, less fortunate, kinds of houses.

The great thing about "madam" is that it works with or without another word attached – unlike "Mr." It's an oddity of the English language that some terms used to address someone don't always work to refer to that person, and vice versa. By which I mean: You can address someone as "sir," or with "Mr." if the name is attached – "Good morning, Mr. Jones." But "mister," standing alone, sounds, well, a little downmarket: "Hey, mister, do you know where you're going?"

Conversely, "sir" is an extremely useful term of address – "Excuse me, sir, did you mean to leave your newspaper?" But it's not really anyone's name; it doesn't work to refer to anyone.

That was the joke in the title of Sidney Poitier's 1967 movie, "To Sir, with Love."
Poitier, playing a teacher in a tough school in London's East End, manages to get his students to address him as "sir." But they don't quite get that it's not his name.

"Lady" in the singular, as a vocative – a term of address – has the same issue as "mister." With a name attached (Lady Bracknell) it's fine. But without it – ixnay. "Hey, lady, you look lost."

"Lady" is the homegrown counterpart to the French import "madame," which lost its "e" when it moved across the English Channel. "Madame," or "madam," literally means "my lady." So does the Italian "madonna," by the way, however closely associated it is with a particular lady.

"Lady" sometimes consorts with "lord," and sometimes hangs around with "gentleman." Both "lord" and "lady" are native English words rooted in the idea of providing daily bread for a household.

There is, alas, more division of roles along gender lines than some moderns would like: The lord "kept ward" over the bread that the lady kneaded. But just as "madam" can be a verb, so can "lady" – another discovery from the OED.

"To lady it over (someone or something)" is a feminine counterpart of "to lord it over" someone – presumably in a ladylike rather than lordly way. Oxford defines this meaning as "to play the lady or mistress."

It cites an example from the 19th-century English poet and classicist William Johnson Cory: "My lawn with a single harebell ladying it over the grass."

A friend who in an earlier life served as an intelligence officer in the Marines recounted the other day that she had once gotten in trouble for addressing a group of her fellow women marines as "guys."

"What should you have said?" I asked.

"'Ladies' would have been OK," she answered. "Or 'marines.' But 'guys,' no."

I can see it now in the recruiting posters: "The Marines. Looking for a few good ladies." Or maybe not.

How did sect get to be a pejorative?

And how should we refer to Shiites and Sunnis – are they different sects?  Is it better to refer to them as branches of Islam?

And if sect is not the right word for the two groups, is sectarian the right word to describe the violence between them in Iraq?

Those are questions that have been kicking around the Monitor newsroom in the wake of last week's article "Sunni vs. Shiite."

The two "quick definitions" of sect offered by onelook.com hint at the range of this word. The first is "a subdivision of a larger religious group." Fairly neutral, that. It anchors the word in the world of faith, but without any particular emotional freight.

The second definition is "a dissenting clique." Now dissent is an honorable concept, rooted deeply in the worlds of theology, the law, and public affairs. The Anglo-Polish mathematician Jacob Bronowski asked,

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

But who would describe himself as a member of "a dissenting clique"? Only someone with a well-developed sense of irony or self-deprecation, meseems.

A clique is a group of friends or associates who literally just click, that is, make noise together. ("Click" in the informal sense of "to hit it off with someone" goes back only to the early 20th century.) The connotation of clique is of a tight group that doesn't readily admit newcomers.

So sect is a term of religious classification, but the odor of quirkiness or even crankiness clings to it. A suggestion of splinteriness, of distinct minority status, is part of it too. Sect also tends to suggest allegiance to a particular leader within a larger movement. It has more of an edge than denomination, a neutral term to refer to various groupings, generally within Protestantism.

But where does sect really come from? I went into this one with an amateur etymologist's working hypothesis: Obviously, sect is related to section, to something cut off or sliced up somehow – as in bisect, dissect, cross section, etc.

Not so, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes to English through French from the Latin secta, meaning "a following," or by extension, a party or faction.

The OED acknowledges in its little note on the subject that many people speculate on the root secare, to cut. But no, the Latin root that seems more plausible, to the OED's collective wisdom, is "sequi," as in sequel, sequence, and consequence. And sectarian indeed comes from "sect."

Both words are particularly rooted in the difficult religious history of 17th-century Britain. Sectarian was a term Presbyterians used to describe Independents, or Separatists. Later Anglicans used it to describe Nonconformists. Oxford's first citation for sectarian was from John Milton in 1649.

Sunni and Shiite Islam are often referred to as the main branches of Islam, rather the way Catholicism and Protestantism are the two broad divisions of Christianity.

But the term "sects" is definitely in use in connection with Islam, too, particularly with reference to smaller groups within the religion, beyond the main two – Druze, Alawites, etc. (Globalsecurity.org has an interesting taxonomy of them on its website.)

Scholars from around the world gathered in Doha, Qatar, last weekend to facilitate discussion among different branches, sects, and schools of thought within Islam. They condemned sectarian violence in Iraq and tried to see beyond differences and dissent.

A scholar from Egypt, Dr. Ahmed Mohamed al-Tayeb, president of Al Azhar University,  denounced the United States for seeking to divide and conquer the Muslim world by overemphasizing sectarian differences. "The ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq cannot be justified as both Sunnis and Shias agree on the same pillars of Islam," he told the Gulf Times.

I'm hard put to think of a word that has come out of nowhere to be so much on people's lips as surge.

It refers, of course, to President Bush's new plan to increase American troop strength in Iraq.

In an interview with Robert Siegel of National Public Radio, linguist Deborah Tannen called surge a "lexical touch-off." By this she seems to mean a term that "sounds like" some other term that comes up in the same context. "Surge," she suggested, sounds like a response to "insurgency."

And surge sounds more positive, more energetic, than "troop buildup" or "escalation." Defense Department officials avoid surge, NPR reported. But from a headline writer's perspective, what's not to love about a word than can express an entire foreign policy option in a single syllable?

This post is at the intersection of two words. The one we've just met, surge, is inescapable.

The other is almost invisible. I'd never seen it – that I remember – until I ran across it by chance while researching something else. That word is ergativity.

At first it looked vaguely Turkish. Then I decided it looked like a Latin-derived tail attached to a Greek head. Erg is a Greek root meaning "work," as in energy, ergonomics, and the like. There's even an English word erg from that root which refers to a very small unit of work: It takes 13,560,000 ergs to make a foot-pound.

Ergativity is a linguistic term, although it does have a connection with who's doing the heavy lifting. And getting a handle on the concept has given me an insight into why surge is being used the way it is now.

Ergativity has to do with the question of agency – not just who or what is the subject of a sentence, but who is the "doer" of the action of the verb. Some languages have a separate grammatical "case" for such "doers."

Something in the Oxford English Dictionary's discussion of all this set my wheels turning. I looked up ergative, and the point I got was that ergativity helps describe the relationship between two brief sentences, "The stone moved" and "John moved the stone." In the latter, John is not just the subject of the sentence but the "ergative subject."

In other words, what’s started out as the stone moving of its own accord (rather unlikely, but this is the dictionary's example) has become the stone moving because of the action of John. John has entered the picture as the mover, the doer.

Hmm. Now think about how you've read and heard "surge" used lately.

The usage that's stood out to me is "surging the troops," as if surging were something one does to troops. Here's a line from a piece Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote last fall in The Wall Street Journal as a member of the Iraq Study Group:

Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight.

Surge, as it's usually used as a verb, is intransitive. It can have a subject, of course, a doer – the troops who will surge.

But surge doesn't have an object; that's what we mean by "intransitive." The troops won't surge anyone or anything. And they won't "get surged," the way John's stone got moved. At least they haven't till now. But for Gerecht, "surging the troops" is an option.

I've heard similar usages in other much less momentous contexts. Once upon a newsroom budget crunch many years ago, one of my colleagues observed that we could probably absorb much of the hit by keeping our correspondents closer to home for two or three months. "We can just travel them a little less," she said.

The correspondents, from their perspective, surely thought of themselves as traveling. From our headquarters perspective, we knew they were, in a sense, "being traveled." (And that's not in either the Robert Frost or the M. Scott Peck sense of the word.)

Another similar example came up the other day at a meeting of a professional group I belong to. As we discussed members in arrears on their dues, someone observed, "If people don't pay, we can just lapse them." Well, "lapse" is intransitive. A membership lapses, or is allowed to lapse. But at this meeting, someone wanted a more forceful response. "Pay up or we'll lapse you!"

As a correspondent in Germany, I picked up an interesting term in the local political parlance, Aktionismus. It might be described as the steps politicians take in response to the cry, "Don't just stand there, do something."

Thus a German information technology magazine reported the other day on an initiative by the Bavarian state government to ban violent computer games. The headline began "Aktionismus?"

I see a connection between some politicians' eagerness to be seen doing something, anything, about a hot issue, on one hand, and the ergative energy of others, on the other hand, who will bend the language into new forms to make themselves sound as if they are making things happen.

It's understandable that those in Washington are desperate for new ideas on the mess in Iraq. And they don't just want to see a "troop surge." They want to "surge the troops" themselves.

The melting pot has been around for quite a while as a way to describe a certain American ideal – "Give us your tired, your poor – your immigrants from wherever, and we'll turn them into Americans." That was the idea: a broad paraphrase of Emma Lazarus by way of Fiorello LaGuardia, with some Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt thrown in.

More recently, this ideal has been called into question. Is it a good thing for newcomers to America to give up their ancestral languages, their perhaps richer traditions of extended family life, or their more interesting food to become, in effect, pretend Anglos?

"No" is the answer from some quarters. A cultural-sensitivity coach in San Francisco sums up a new attitude thus:

Today the trend is toward multiculturalism, not assimilation. The old "melting pot" metaphor is giving way to new metaphors such as "salad bowl" and "mosaic", mixtures of various ingredients that keep their individual characteristics. Immigrant populations within the United States are not being blended together in one "pot", but rather they are transforming American Society into a truly multicultural mosaic.

The first time I can remember hearing the term "multicultural" was in Australia in 1984, where I reported on an extensive "multicultural television" operation based in Sydney. Reviewing the piece I wrote at the time, I see I did use the phrase melting pot – as a culinary metaphor.

But was I right? There are relatively few ingredients that one melts in the kitchen – butter, fat, chocolate, perhaps cheese. One doesn't, in any cuisine I'm aware of, melt whole assemblages of ingredients into a single dish.

Soupmaking may be a good source of metaphors for different approaches to assimilation or multiculturalism. Some soups are homogenized through a blender - get it? In other soups, the constituent elements remain distinct. My mother used to make what she called a vegetable soup with chunks of beef big enough that we ate it with knife and fork.

But a melting pot is not a soup kettle. Here's a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal in 1845:

[A]s in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent, – asylum of all nations, – the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, – of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages."

This passage reflects some strange ideas about metallurgy – Emerson seems here to be promoting a sort of reverse alchemy, whereby gold is turned into baser metal. But it's clear that the pot he had in mind was not in the kitchen.

My thinking was also nudged a bit by one of the definitions I found for "melting pot": "a vessel made of material that does not melt easily; used for high temperature chemical reactions."

In this way the "not-melting" aspect seems as important as the "melting." There's a metaphor there for a vessel that can take the heat.

It may give us a way to think about the difference between the essential framework – the constitutional system, so to speak – and the ever-changing content held within that framework – the new peoples and new cultures that come to a country. And that metaphor may be a way to think about assimilation and multiculturalism.

If we pay attention to literal meaning, even a metaphor long since morphed into cliché may still have lessons for us.

One of the premises of this blog is that language is a source of delight, but a serious business, too.

There are, after all, places where language is a matter of life and death. The deliberation room where a jury considers sentencing options in a capital case is one of them.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago while reporting on a national conference on race and the death penalty. One of the presenters remarked en passant that jurors, asked to determine whether a defendant found guilty of a capital crime should be given a life sentence or the death penalty, are instructed to consider "mitigating" or "aggravating" factors.

Quite often, he said, jurors don't really know what either of those words means.

Hmm, I thought. I feel some research coming on. And I suspect those two aren't the only words that cause jurors trouble.

In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty, as it was then being administered, was imposed so arbitrarily as to constitute "cruel and unusual punishment." In his concurring opinion in the Furman case, Justice Potter Stewart wrote,

These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed.

In response to this decision, some states passed mandatory sentencing laws, which the high court found unacceptable because they erred in the opposite direction providing no discretion or flexibility at all.

As jurisprudence has evolved, it's become clear that for a state to be "successful," if that's the word, in administering capital punishment, it must follow a very narrow path between arbitrariness on one side and inflexibility on the other hand.

Jury instructions – those documents that tell the citizens in the deliberation room how to consider "mitigating" and "aggravating" factors in passing sentence – have emerged as critically important.

But they can be utterly baffling to jurors, researchers have found. Shari Seidman Diamond, at Northwestern University Law School, described one such set of instructions as "unconstitutionally incomprehensible," in a 1993 journal article called "Instructing on Death."

She quoted what she called a "quadruple negative" sentence from some legal language in use in Illinois:

"If you do not unanimously find from your consideration of all the evidence there are no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude imposition of a death sentence, then you should sign the verdict requiring the court to impose a sentence other than death."

In lay terms: "To impose the death penalty, all jurors must agree that the defendant did something much worse than just plain murder."

In this universe, is it any wonder why a criminal defense lawyer like the late Johnnie Cochran would seize on a line like "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"? It's easy to imagine how, amid the din of legal-speak, such an utterance would fall on the ears of a bewildered juror like a snatch of familiar melody tucked into an avant-garde composition.

Diamond concluded, "If it turns out that arbitrariness or crude inflexible standards are the inevitable price of capital punishment, we may ultimately decide that the price is too high."

After interviewing 1,201 jurors who actually made life or death sentencing decisions in 354 capital trials in 14 different states, jury expert William Bowers wrote:

Despite…reforms…research now demonstrates that jurors are not deciding who deserves the death penalty in the way the US Supreme Court has held the constitution requires.

Actually, he told me the other day, jury instructions are written in language that is meant to be accessible – to other lawyers, that is. Judges are trying to "insulate themselves against legal challenges," as Mr. Bowers put it – to avoid having verdicts overturned in higher courts. Thus they rely on boilerplate instructions that follow closely the language of statutes themselves and the case law that grows out of them.

But jurors don't have access to that body of knowledge, or that vocabulary of terms of art, says Richard Wiener, a professor at the University of Nebraska who has studied juries.

Perhaps even worse, juries may think they know what given words mean when they don't. Two of the biggies are the ones my source at the conference mentioned: aggravating and mitigating. These are important because they come up regularly in the second phase – the penalty phase – of a capital trial, as is now required by law.

"Aggravation," to the extent that it is likely to come out of the mouth of Jack or Jill Average Citizen at all, is widely used to mean "irritation" or "annoyance"as in, "That boy is such an aggravation to me!"

I can hear it now, in the inner ear of memory, from the lips of my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hill. As I grew up and developed a closer relationship with my dictionary, I noted a distinction between Mrs. Hill's use of "aggravation" – which Webster tags "informal" – and the stricter meaning "to worsen or make more serious." (Note that "grav," as in "grave" or serious.)

Jurors, however, asked to consider "aggravating factors" in a capital case, are likely to think they're being asked whether they feel the victim did anything to annoy the defendant, Wiener reports. Similarly, legal experts say "mitigating" (lessening the gravity or culpability, or guilt, of an action) is often misinterpreted as referring to a factor that makes a crime worse.

"Psychologically thought through, like premeditated. Where you think about it beforehand and have it planned out—it's conceived," is the definition one of Wiener's juror research subjects gave for "mitigating."

Wiener has done some jury simulations and identified some things that help relieve jurors' confusion: simpler language that trims out the double and triple negatives, and also excises superfluous adjectives. Also useful: flow charts that show the jurors where they and the case are in the legal process, and what options are available at each step of the process.

The boilerplate of any given set of instructions can go back 50 or 100 years, Wiener notes, over which time language changes. "'Wantonly vile crime' – who talks like that?" Wiener asks rhetorically. "Maybe a hundred years ago people did, but no one does now."