Time, manner, place. Time, manner, place.

That was my mnemonic when, as I high school student, I struggled to learn the rules for ordering German adverbs and adverbial phrases. "I love in summer with you down the Rhein to sail." The time phrase ("in summer") is followed by indicators of manner ("with you") and place" ("down the Rhein").

It seemed utterly wrong. The only way through seemed to be to memorize the rules. Hmph! We don't have rules like this in English – or do we?

Hmm. Does the fact that this sounds so wrong in English suggest perhaps that there are rules there, too – just different from those of German? This thought appeared at my elbow and tugged at my sleeve.

In the years since, I've realized that this hunch was right. English and, I assume, other languages, are full of rules that no one teaches - not to native speakers anyway - but that everyone learns.

Take a sentence like this: "In the park today, we saw six gorgeous immaculately restored antique flame-red Italian racing cars." That's quite a string of adjectives, but they're placed in order according to a hierarchy that leaves "time, manner, place" in the dust.

This whole question was the focus of the Tip of the Week from the newsletter Copy Editor a couple of weeks ago. A reader had written in: "I deal with a lot of non-native English speakers, and a question frequently arises as to what order to use for a string of adjectives or adverbs. We (editors) know to say '21 large green tables' but why not 'green large 21 tables'? or '21 green large tables'? Is there a rule for this?" Wendalyn Nichols, editor of Copy Editor, responded, "There is indeed a standard order for adjectives, and you’ll find it described in dictionaries and textbooks for learners of English as a second language."

Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.

Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.

Seeing terms for age and national origin as essential seems at odds with the ethos of equal opportunity, but I'm stuck with this system for now at least, just was I was stuck with time, manner, place in German. And if these modifiers are in the right order (unlike, say, "young, angry man"), they need no commas.

I don't mean to sound cranky about commas. But too many of them together are sometimes an indication of prose not well thought through and not flowing gracefully enough.

Punctuation is form of signage. I'm not against signs. But an excess of signage in a public space such as an airport or a courthouse is often a sign of poor design, or an attempt to superimpose some kind of new order on the natural traffic flows of a building. ("This door is not an entrance.")

Similarly I find that if I calm down and reorder words, I can often avoid some punctuation. "His battered old canvas fishing hat" is the phrase usage expert Wilson Follett uses to demonstrate what he calls "superposed" adjectives. I think of them as layered adjectives. We start with "hat." "Fishing" tells you fundamentally what kind of hat this is. ("Purpose" in the taxonomy above.) "Canvas" is from the "material" column. "Old" represents the "age" column. "Battered" is a "quality" adjective on Nichols's hierarchy, or an "opinion" one on some others. ("Battered?" Whose hat are you calling "battered" anyway?) "His" is a determiner.

I had no idea I knew all these rules, but here they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible explanations:

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

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

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

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

A reader's lament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wie, bitte? Come again?

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

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

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

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

A preposition is a word you are not supposed to end a sentence with.

Most – many? who knows? – of us have heard this rule at some point.

We're also likely to have heard that Winston Churchill is said to have described the rule as "nonsense up with which I shall not put." (The remark is in dispute and may be completely apocryphal.)

The nyah-nyah literalist's case for not ending a sentence with a preposition is etymological: "Preposition" gets its name from being placed (positioned) before (pre). A preposition is something that is pre-positioned, that is, placed before (before in space, not time) something else: The book is on the shelf. "On" is placed before "the shelf."

There are a few cases where another rule prevails, as in: Charlie couldn't get to work on time, all his efforts notwithstanding. "Notwithstanding" is identified in my dictionary as prep. But there's a view among some grammarians that this is an example of a postposition, a word used as a "relator," like a preposition but appearing after its object.

Come to find out there's even an adverb for this kind of situation. In the sentence about Charlie above, we can say "notwithstanding" is being used "postpositionally." Another example is homeward. The "ward" is a vestigial "postposition." He looked homeward = He looked toward home.

English sentences usually march along in a pretty straightforward fashion. Because we don't have a lot of inflections – endings that give special signals about how a word is being used – word order is important.

But every once in a while there's a surprise, and we find a word not where we would expect it to be. It's a sign of variety in our language, and of the continuing influences from a variety of sources. I've been thinking about all this because "A.Word.A.Day" not long ago went through a week of postpositives, adjectives that typically follow the noun they modify.

That's another example of a class of words not where you would expect to find them. After all, in English, adjectives typically pile up before nouns. The list of preposition was diverse: It included regent, from Latin, as in, "the prince regent," to refer to one who rules when the monarch is indisposed or under age.

It also featured prepense, an Anglo-Norman term from Latin, a legal term meaning "premeditated." It's a counterpart to the Anglo-Saxon aforethought, as in "malice aforethought."

A strong presence of French and Latin in such a list, especially for legal usage, should be no surprise. French was the official language of Parliament and the law in England from the Norman Conquest until 1362, and continued unofficially for some time after that.

The list of postpositives included galore, meaning "abundant," from Irish; and agonistes, from Greek, meaning one engaged in a struggle – as in Milton's "Samson Agonistes," or a few centuries later, Garry Wills's "Nixon Agonistes."

The fifth item was akimbo, meaning with hands on hips and elbows bent outward. I would argue that it seems more like an adverb, but one has to appreciate the conciseness of the expression. It seems to come from Scandinavia, rooted in the idea of arms "at a keen bow."

The Online Etymology Dictionary makes the charming observation that many languages turn to a teapot metaphor to handle this concept. The French term is faire le pot à deux anses, to make the pot with two handles. Having that kind of metaphor in the language must undercut the force of the pose as a gesture of defiance, however.

The New York Times has called A.Word.A.Day, which sends out literally a word a day, five days a week, to a vast subscriber list, "the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace." There's a theme each week, and it's a reminder of the riches of language.

One little bit of verbal abundance – words galore! I might say – I've enjoyed lately is the term adposition, not to be confused with "ad position." This refers to how far up or down on a Web page a given spot appears. It is a matter of keen interest to online advertisers.

Adposition is a linguist's blanket or umbrella term for prepositions and postpositions. Come to find out there's even ambiposition, for words that can go either way: "She slept through the night" vs. "She slept the night through."

Arguably, notwithstanding falls into this camp. For the true connoisseur, there are "circumpositions," adpositions that bracket their complement fore and aft: "From that time on, he watched every game." Here time is the complement, or object, and from and on form the circumposition.

There is no end to this. Some of the examples my research turned up were in Arabic, or Kurdish, or Dutch, or German. Some grammarians are identifying new prepositions – terms that I learned as phrasal prepositions: on account of, by dint of, etc. What an abundance – adpositions galore. Or maybe just more words we shouldn't end a sentence with.

The question came up the other day in a Monitor article from the Middle East: "A poll shows that a third of Palestinians want to leave because of violence and economic woes."

"Shouldn't 'a third' take a singular verb, 'wants'?" one of the team inquired. After some instant-messaging back-and-forth, it was decided to leave in place the plural verb that had seemed right to however many editors had seen the story before it reached the colleague who raised the question: "A third of Palestinians want…"

Welcome to the world of "notional agreement." This is a concept that Bill Walsh of The Washington Post, and The Slot, a superstar of the copy-editing world, has promoted of late. He's stirred up a fair bit of controversy, by the way.

The idea is that meaning can trump form. To apply it to our example, the idea is that although "a third" is a singular noun, it refers to a group of people definitely plural in number and so should take a plural verb.

This sentence follows a certain pattern: "half of all incoming freshmen," "most of the Senate," "some of my closest friends," and so on. In this pattern, the object of the preposition – what comes after "of" – is critical.

"The Palestinians" may be "a people," but for polling purposes they are a group of individuals whose individual views were presumably the whole point of the poll. I would have gone with a singular verb, though, if the sentence had been phrased differently: "Every third Palestinian wants to leave" or "One Palestinian in three wants to leave."

Walsh is onto something with "notional agreement," but it's a principle to be invoked sparingly. I'd try to reach a decision on some other basis first.

Another "number" issue that comes up frequently has to do with how to think of an organization, especially a business. Is this an "it" or a "they"?

"The Smith Company has their headquarters in Boston." The singular verb with the singular noun seems to be pretty well rooted in common American usage – but note the possessive adjective "their." It ought to be "its."

And yet it's not hard to see where this usage comes from – a business is somehow both singular and plural, an "it" and a "they."

"At the Smith Company, they do things right." Well, OK, this might work as an advertising slogan.

But if it's part of some standard expository prose, a nit-picking copy editor may ask, "What's the antecedent for the pronoun 'they'?" Or to translate into ordinary English, "Who are 'they' supposed to be?"

"They" are presumably the people who work there. Isn't that understood? Arguably. But good writing avoids making the reader fill in little gaps like that.

It's worse with sports teams. Consider an instance like "South Carolina is looking for their third win." Doug Fisher of the University of Southern California, who has challenged Walsh on "notional agreement," thinks this one ought to be "its third win." The case to make for "their," he says, would be that "we’re not talking about the school" - singular - "but about a handful of guys" - plural - "out to win a football game." But he doesn't buy it.

Many team names are straightforwardly plural – the Celtics, the Patriots – and also lend themselves to straightforward singulars: "It was the last time he suited up as a Celtic."

Other team names don't exhibit quite the same flexibility. Can one speak of a single Red Sock? It suggests something unfortunate happening in the laundry room.

Some of my favorite team names are the newer conceptual ones: the New England Revolution and the Chicago Fire, for instance, two major-league soccer teams. Both names combine energy and a sense of history. And both are distinctly singular nouns without any hint of collectivity – not even what's implicit in organizational terms like "company" or "school."

And yet these singular teams are often paired with plural verbs, both in radio news bulletins, and on the team website, which announced a while back, "The New England Revolution are currently selling season tickets."

This sounds like a BBC bulletin on football (soccer) results: "Manchester United have defeated Arsenal." British usage has long since elevated this kind of construction into "high art," as Fisher of USC observes.

I get a kick out of it because it always sounds so veddy, veddy BBC. But it's based on a principle that Americans might do well to follow more often: A singular collective noun – group, team, staff, family – can take a singular or plural verb, depending on whether its members are acting severally or in concert.

A couple of other points for people try to keep this stuff straight:

- Plural amounts – typically prices and rates – are proxies for singular notions, and so take singular verbs. ("He thought $300,000 was a fair price for the house.")

- Some ostensibly plural subjects represent singular concepts and thus take singular verbs: "Fish and chips is his favorite dish." But be careful with this one; the singular concept has to be very clear.

However helpful it can be, though, to understand a collective noun as a "they," if we're talking about winning a game, I have to wonder what the point is of emphasizing a team's "severalness." Didn't they win because they all pulled together, acting as one – deserving a singular verb?

Yes, they did.

Oops. I suppose that ought to be, "Manchester United won because it all pulled together."

Or maybe not.

The other day, while looking over a review of an Asian restaurant for a lifestyle magazine I work on, I ran across a reference to "Tuna Tar Tar."

Hmm??

Is this a specialty they serve in Pago Pago? Or among the Mau Mau rebels?

Is there such a thing as Mahi-Mahi Tar Tar?

Finally it dawned on me that what was meant was "tuna tartare," a sort of raw seafood equivalent to "steak tartare," which is essentially raw ground beef dressed up for a party. (It may be that both dishes are popular because, being uncooked, they can be served chop-chop.)

According to one recipe website, "The legend goes that Tartare tribes when fighting in the past didn't even have time to stop and cook their food. They are said to have kept the meat underneath their saddles and mince it in this way."

Well, if they didn't have time to cook their beef, they surely didn't have time to ride from the steppes of Central Asia all the way to the fishing grounds of Japan to catch their tuna. Did Tartars really make their way that far east?

On the other hand, Le Bernardin, in New York, the source of the tuna recipe I found online, is a very highly regarded restaurant where they presumably know whereof they speak.

I did have to check the spelling of "tartar" in my dictionary, though, and when I found no relevant entry for tuna, I decided to follow the analogy of its beefy counterpart and add the "e."

But "steak tartare," I note, is a locution my dictionary calls "pseudo-French."

Pseudo-French it may be, but a Google search for the phrase on French-language pages has just scored 60,000-plus hits. That suggests that pseudo-French must have a lot of native speakers (pseudo-Francophones?).

At least one of these recipe pages suggests that "true" steak tartare is made with horseflesh, which made its appearance in butcher shops around Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. That would seem to put a dent in the Genghis Khan theory of chopped beef.

Other sources trace the odyssey of ground beef from Russian to Germany (specifically, Hamburg) to New York, specifically to places like Delmonico's Restaurant, where steak tartare was evidently on the menu a century or more before Le Bernardin opened in the city.

All this demonstrates the "legs" a good bit of euphemism can have – "tartare" has caught on as a chi-chi way to say "raw" across a variety of cuisines around the world.

This little round of research has also reminded me of the fixative power of print – of dictionaries, in particular. I suspect that the writer of the restaurant review mentioned earlier may have simply taken the phrase "tuna tar tar" from a menu, written perhaps by someone not a native speaker of English, or even of pseudo-French. And the writer may have had the echo of "mahi-mahi" in the back of her mind.

But in my dictionary, I had authoritative guidance.

Words go into dictionaries in forms that may reflect who knows what ideas about Mongol hordes or Pacific fishermen or Parisian butchers. Once a word is officially "in," though, its evolution tends to slow down considerably.

To continue our culinary theme, you might say a dictionary can put a phrase into aspic. (I would Americanize that as "Jell-o," but somehow "put into Jell-o" lacks the metaphorical meaning that "put into aspic" has.)

Sometimes spelling changes reflect incorrect ideas of where a word comes from. Our English word "cutlet" came into French from "côtelette," a diminutive of "côte," meaning "rib." It has nothing to do with cutting. But people thought it did, and the spelling morphed – and the word was accepted into dictionaries that way, and it's likely to stay that way.

"Highfalutin" is another example of the fixative power of a dictionary. It's an adjective, generally tagged "informal," and it means "pretentious" or "pompous," or "affectedly genteel." Its origin isn't clear but it's generally described as coming from "high" plus "floating," or more often "fluting."

Just what "high-fluting" would mean is open to speculation, so I'll speculate that it's similar to the idea of "tooting one's own horn" or maybe "having too many bells and whistles."

The final "ing" has long since become "in," in the manner of easygoin', slow-talkin' Americans everywhere – but oddly, the apostrophe customary in such constructions has disappeared. This faux folksiness has been frozen into the spelling of the word in about a dozen popular dictionaries I've just consulted.

Isn't this great – a dictionary standard way of spelling an informal term used to put down pretentiousness?

Ned Lamont's defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary Aug. 8 may be all over but the shouting.

But the reverberations have reached the Monitor's in-box. The headline on our story on the vote read, "Ned Lamont's victory impacts both parties in the run-up to November and even into 2008."

This prompted a reader to write, "IMPACT IS NOT A VERB!" and call this usage a "horrible butchery of the English language."

"So, is he right?" a colleague asked as he passed the message along to me.

Well, yes and no. This kind of absolutist language is often cover for something like "Sister Margaret/Mr. Asbill/Mrs. Kleinfehler told us in eighth grade/11th grade/senior year never to use 'impact' as a verb."

Plenty of people do use it that way, but not without controversy.

The American Heritage Dictionary observes, "The use of impact as a verb meaning 'to have an effect' often has a big impact on readers," and notes that strong majorities of its in-house usage panel disapprove of "impact" or "impact on" as verb constructions.

The AHD goes on, though, to defend this usage as well established, going all the way back to 1935. But the chief style guru at one of the country's premier newspapers has a rule that any usage that prompts this kind of discussion is to be avoided. Period.

Similarly, Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, the official dictionary of the Associated Press, calls "impact" as a verb "a usage objected to by some." This is a notably permissive dictionary, though, so that "objected to by some" can be read as "don't go there."

"Affect" is the verb that's unquestionably correct here. It's from Latin, rooted in the none-too-exciting idea doing something to something else.

"Impact" comes from a word meaning to "impinge," which sounds slippery and insinuating. But I understand why people like "impact." It sounds so much more forceful than "affect." It packs a punch, just by the way it sounds, with its flat "a" and its crunched-together final consonants.

Whenever I see "impact," I can always see the fender crunching into the guard rail. It's a cream-colored convertible, top down, of course, and it's going to be an expensive repair job.

Language changes over time. Verbs have become nouns, and nouns, verbs. But people can get a little irrational about issues like "impact" as a verb, as some of the online discussion attests.

I was pondering this, in perhaps more depth than it deserved, on my Sunday morning walk a couple of weeks ago when suddenly it hit me: Maybe this isn't about dictionaries and logic.

Maybe this is an anthropological issue - best understood with some sort of scientific formula, you know, like what you see in the movies when the undiscovered genius stands silent before the blackboard for a few moments and then suddenly picks up the chalk and starts scribbling furiously, until voilà! A major scientific problem is solved.

Let y be the year one started school.

Let p be the average age of one's parents at one's birth. This could be further refined to express something like the average age of the household in which one grew up. In a family of older parents and fewer children, more "adult" conversation prevails even when the children are small.

Let t be temperament: Some people are conservative, staying within received tradition; others are fashion-forward, in clothes as in language.

Let α be attitude toward authority: Do Sister Margaret's rules – or Mr. Asbill's – represent a comforting ordering of the universe? Or some manifestation of global oppression?

Let s be sensitivity to language. Some people just don't get the rules, period. And those who do are often split between those who do so intellectually (and sometimes follow the rules out the window) and those who "play by ear" – who are well-spoken if they are surrounded by others who are, too, but who can't really explain their word choices.

Let C be the cosmopolitan factor: Did your family move around as you were growing up? Did you have next-door neighbors from India, for instance, or a piano teacher from Scotland, who exposed you to a different standard of English?

Let λ be the literary factor: How widely read are you, and across what time frame? If your reading is mostly from the contemporary business press, for instance, you'll be exposed to one kind of writing. If you've read widely in English literature over the past couple of centuries, you won't blink at a word like "unwonted," and you'll know what a "fortnight" is.

Let β be the budget of the school system you went through, and let f be the educational fad prevailing when you were there. ("Let's not burden the kids with grammar rules! Let's just let them express themselves!" "No, back to basics! Gotta have grammar!")

So we end up with this:

Combining all these elements somehow, we end up with this as a formula to predict whether someone will use "impact" as a verb:

y=1^η∑ (α ∗ t)
(C * λ) s ^p{β+f}

Is that perfectly clear? Now if I could only calculate the values for the variables.

Now that the students of North America are heading back to school, settling in at their computers to write real papers for grades, and not just text messages for fun, they're facing again what we year-round working-world grown-ups have been putting up with all summer.

I'm referring to those "helpers" (note those strategic quotation marks) that are a feature of Microsoft's widely used Word software. As you probably know, dear reader, they appear under selected bits of one's prose - and they do the selecting, alack! - to flag dubious spellings and signal subject-verb issues.

Talk about mixed feelings.

Look, I learned this stuff in school. I don't want some snippy grammar gnome taking issue with my construing a collective noun as a plural. "Our staff come from all over the country."

And I know what I'm doing when I'm using an archaic verb ending. That's called literary allusion, you electronic nincompoop.

On the other hand, I will humbly acknowledge that the squiggly tyrants have saved me from embarrassment more than once by signaling missing words or transposed letters, a particular problem with the skinny little "i's" and "l's" and "t's" of the sans-serif fonts so common in online publishing. (It makes me think the ancient Romans were onto something with their serifs, as in the wonderful inscriptions on the Trajan column, which live on today in so much typography.)

Still, any writer, even a young student, should resist being pushed around or just using the grammar and spell-check help automatically.

One sign of abdication of authority I've seen popping up lately, especially in ads, is the not-so-smart apostrophe. In a phrase like "child of the '60s," for instance, if the writer has the "smart quotes" feature turned on, the software will interpret that initial apostrophe as an open single quote, which is shaped like a little "6." And so that little "6" is what will pop up on the screen. What's needed is the little "9," which serves as both the close single quote and the apostrophe.

This sounds arcane – OK, it is arcane – but once I noticed the phenomenon, I started to see it surprisingly often. People are not standing up to their electronic helpers.

I hear myself sounding stern when I say that. And yet I remember, when the switch from typewriters to computers came, how delighted I was to let a computer take over the function of syllable breaks – the decision of where to put the hyphen when the word doesn't fit on the line. Is relying on Word's spelling and grammar help instead of flipping through the dictionary or thumbing through Strunk and White that much different from letting the computer hyphenate for me? (Word has not heard of "Strunk," by the way, but accepts the capitalized "White" without cavil.)

And besides, isn't it just wonderful that writing on the computer lets you jump around and write things down as you think of them and rewrite endlessly without embarrassing xxx-ing out?

Well, of course. And yet – that seems to be the refrain here, doesn't it? – I can't think of anything in my education that did more to teach me to write on demand than the discipline of sitting down in a busy newsroom every morning, literally under the gaze of my boss, cranking a couple of sheets into a manual typewriter, and banging out, on deadline, a story composed on the machine and written from top to bottom in classic inverted pyramid form.

Another ancient discipline that seemed tedious at the time but has proved its value is sentence diagramming.

Talk about retro. Is recommending quill pens next? you may well be wondering. For those who missed it at the first pass, sentence diagramming is a system of graphic representation of a sentence, showing the essentials – subject and verb – yet also accommodating all the add-ons: adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases.

Diagrams make clear how a sentence really works, or help diagnose why it doesn't. One of the sites I found included a quote from Gertrude Stein, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

With all due respect to the redoubtable Stein, I'm not sure I'd go that far. But the same site has an interesting passage from an Inventor's Daily piece of a few years ago, about an executive who drew on the sentence diagramming techniques he learned in a parochial high school in Philadelphia to solve business problems:

"Sit down quietly. Take (the issue) apart into its component parts. Make sure all the components fit together well. They've got to be well chosen, fit together and make sense. There are few (business) problems that can't be solved that way …," Mallon said. "Sentence diagramming is one of the best analytical techniques I ever learned."

There may be evidence that today's students may not be utterly resistant to such learning. Concern that new communications technologies are destroying teens' competence in English are unfounded, according to a Canadian linguist who has studied young people's messaging habits. As Sci-Tech Today summarized it:

if u think ur kids cant talk rite cuz of iming then we mite lol.

As the Globe and Mail reported:

University of Toronto researchers have found that teenagers are not losing what they learn in English class, but rather demonstrating a mastery of formal and informal language when chatting on-line with friends.

We can only hope the new skills they master will let them stand up to the tyranny of the red and green squiggly lines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the lessons of experience as an editor is how small an error it takes to damage the credibility of a piece of writing. Even a name misspelled can defeat a writer's entire mission.

Sometimes readers will be put off by tics in someone's prose that they can't even identify or explain. There’s prose, for instance, where the sentences don't hang together as smoothly as they should because they're full of pronouns and other words that refer to concepts the writer has kept offstage, instead of properly introducing them.

My colleagues and I have been kicking around a term for this: indeterminate antecedent syndrome (hereinafter IAS). For example: "In the run-up to the French elections, politicians there are very nervous about the blue-collar vote."

With just a slight tweak, this can be turned into "the run-up to the elections in France." This makes for better-flowing prose, because it provides a nice solid referent to hook "there" onto – a prepositional phrase rather than just an adjective.

At the level of concrete meaning, of course, "French elections" and "elections in France" are the same thing. The reader can generally connect the dots in a situation like this. But how much better for the dots to be already connected by the writer.

Don't look for IAS in your grammar book. I've just made it up. "Indeterminate" grows from roots meaning roughly "not having a fixed limit or boundary," but I'm using the word in an extended sense of "not exactly known, established, or defined." An antecedent is something which goes before something else. In grammar, an antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers: In the sentence "Jim will be late for dinner because he won't be able to leave work before 6," "Jim" is the antecedent for the pronoun "he."

Pronouns are great savers of time and space but they need to stay in touch with their antecedents, which must be clear.

I'm using "syndrome" to mean a "complex of concurrent things," things that literally "run together." "Syn" is the Greek combining form meaning "together," whcih we know from, for instance, "synergy" ("working together"). The particle "drome" comes from the Greek word "to run." (A dromedary is a racing camel. While my earnest grammatical self is trying to clarify all this, my subconscious keeps trying to suggest a poster image for IAS: a confused camel bounding around in the desert in search of the antecedent trail.)

Another example of IAS: "The defense secretary followed military advice in advising the White House to purchase a herd of Alpine elephants for use in drug interdiction in South America. They recommended the pachyderms as especially well suited to Andean terrain."

Now whose recommendation was that? If I'm completely literal-minded, "they" seems to refer to the elephants, but it really refers to the military brass. But they haven't been properly introduced. They're sneaked in through an adjectival construction that has the same problem as the "French elections" we considered a moment ago. We're better off with "The defense secretary followed the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," or something like that.

"Pachyderm," by the way (from Greek words meaning "thick skin"), is actually a general term that includes hippos and rhinos. But it's generally used as another name for "elephant," just as the rewrite desk uses "the world body" as another term for "the United Nations," and just as sports writers call the Yankees "the Bronx Bombers."

This reach for a synonym is almost second nature for many writers. As I composed the sentence above about the secretary of defense, "pachyderm" just popped out. But nobody would say it in casual conversation. Even I wouldn't.

This phenomenon, which we’re calling reflexive formulaic synonymosis (hereinafter RFS), is a frequent travel companion of IAS. Sometimes both occur in the same sentence, as in (brace yourself): "In the run-up to the French elections, politicians in the European country are worried about the blue-collar vote."

"In the European country?" Is that something we have to explain?

But not all synonyms are reflexive or formulaic; they can be a good way to give some words the breathing room they need.

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, the journalism think tank, has a phrase for this concept: "word territory." He begins his excellent piece on this point:

Observe "word territory." Give key words their space. Do not repeat a distinctive word unless you intend a specific effect.

If Clark thinks spatially about this point, I think in terms of color. Some words are simply too "beige" for anyone to worry about searching for a synonym for them. They're functional neutrals that just fit in and call no attention to themselves. Other words are like accent colors (chartreuse? Chinese red?) that you might use just once or maybe twice in a piece.

Clark's piece includes a strong defense of "say" as an all-purpose verb to report people's utterances. He's right. "Say" is as beige a word as they come.

Here’s the counsel from my corner: Try not to build on concepts you haven’t properly introduced, and don't strain for synonyms. And unless you really want to make a point, don't say "pachyderm" twice in the same piece.

On a recent trip, as my plane descended, I heard a familiar announcement: "As we prepare for landing, it is important that your seatbacks and tray tables are in their locked and upright positions."

Hmm, I thought. Shouldn't that have been in the subjunctive? "It is important that your seatbacks and tray tables be in their locked and upright positions." Perhaps everyone isn't all locked and upright – maybe that doofus in 17C is still reclining to the max and dozing, maybe 7A still has her computer out as she tries to wrestle her spreadsheet into submission.

But it is still important that seatbacks and tray tables be locked and upright. That the goal has not been achieved doesn't make it less worth striving for. The subjunctive is just perfect for covering this disparity, but as my experience suggests, it's not always called upon.

A Google search of the words "disappearing" and "subjunctive" the other day brought up 15,000 hits – not an overwhelming number, in Web terms, but an indication that I'm not the only one thinking about this.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) observes, "It has long been conventional to observe that the … subjunctive is fast disappearing from English, and the statement is partly true."

What exactly is the subjunctive? Well, it's a mood. Just as people have their moods - good, bad, sunny, gloomy, cranky – so do verbs. They just have different ones: Theirs are called indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. As the Columbia Guide explains,

"An indicative verb is one that makes a factual or actual statement, as contrasted with a verb in the subjunctive mood, which makes a doubtful, conditional, or hypothetical statement or one contrary to fact or in some sense subordinate to another statement."

Like much language about language, this may sound unbearably complex. But it refers to distinctions we make all the time. The indicative mood is where we usually live. The sentence "I generally get home by 5" has an indicative verb. If we say, "It is important that he get home at 5," that "he get" is a subjunctive. If we say, "Get home by 5, or else," we've moved into the imperative mode – the language of direct command.

The argument against the subjunctive is that it's weak. And truly, if "I" really want "him" home at 5, I'm probably better off addressing him directly with an imperative verb: "Get home at 5."

But imperative can be imperious, and a subjunctive can be a clear but impersonal way of articulating a standard, an expectation, of putting one's foot down without getting in anyone's face.

For instance, the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle sets forth its rules for what may or may not be hung from its rafters:

It is imperative that your banners (size and placement) be approved in advance of your show.… Commercial graphics may be hung in the facility for a fee of $500 per each graphic and shall be billed to the client in the event invoice.

The third-person "shall" is an especially nice touch that one rarely sees nowadays.

To the degree that the subjunctive lingers in independent clauses (stand-alone sentences) at all, it's largely in traditional set phrases: "Long live the king" or the words spoken at each session of the Supreme Court of the United States: "God save the United States and this honorable court!" It's enough to make you look for the powdered wigs, isn't it?

Less grandly, the very familiar term "goodbye" is another subjunctive: It derives from "God be with ye."

Where I really feel the need for more subjunctive, though, is in those dependent clauses: It is important that seatbacks and tray tables be in their locked and upright positions.

For more cosmic examples: It is important that we overcome our addiction to oil. It is imperative that we resolve the problem of illegal immigration. It is essential, many policymakers argue, that Iran not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

At least one keen amateur observer of things subjunctive, C.E.A. Finney, whose day job is as a professor of engineering at the University of Tennessee, challenges the notion that what he calls "a beautiful and valuable component of the English language" is dying out, and suggests that instead, "it actually is enjoying a subtle revival."

His Web pages on the subject include a list of real-life contemporary examples of people actually using it, besides.

I'd like to think he's right. The subjunctive – a verb form used to refer to possibilities, doubts, desires, hopes, fears, wishes, external imperatives – would seem so suited to that great gap between real and ideal in which we spend so much of our human lives that I'd expect it to be in great demand.

We are at the point in our spring in Boston (never mind yesterday's snow showers) when the leaves are just barely starting to come out. Rather than appearing as individual leaves; the new growth just tends to give the structure of bare branches and twigs a greenish cast against the sky.

Like the trees in spring, our language keeps producing new growth, too – such as the extra syllable in "forecast" I saw sprouting the other day in a newspaper graphic.

"Forecasted," it said. Hmm. Shouldn't that be just "forecast"? According to my dictionary, yes: It lists "forecasted" as an alternative, but clearly not a first choice.

The chart gave some solid dots of data for years of the recent past, and then certainty melted away in favor of estimates for the future. Perhaps the author of the chart felt a need for "estimated" or "projected" or some other satisfyingly three-syllable word, and ended up adding a syllable to "forecast."

"Forecast" means literally "thrown forward," as does "projected," by the way.
"Cast" itself means essentially "to throw." On its own, it tends to sound biblical, in no small part because it is biblical ("He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"). It shows up in compounds (castoffs, castaways, broadcast, forecast, simulcast) or specialized meanings or idioms (to cast doubt; the "cast" of a play – consisting of those who have been "thrown" into their roles).

But however literary it may sound, it's one of a group of very ordinary English words whose present and past tenses, as well as past participle, are all the same. Don't let the terminology rattle you: I’m talking about words like "cut" and "hit" and "shut" and "put."

There is no "cutted," or "hitted" or "shutted." And there's not supposed to be "casted." The one entry I find for "casted" in OneLook.com, a site that lets me compare multiple online dictionaries, gives only one dictionary with an entry for "casted," and it's in the 1828 Webster's Dictionary. And when I look it up, I’m sternly told: "casted, pp. For cast, is not in use."

That said, "casted" is all over the Internet , on e-commerce sites selling belt buckles and bedsteads and other similar goods. (These are evidently people who don't remember Joyce's pun in "Ulysses": "What opera is like a railway line?" to which the answer is "Rose of Castile" – rows of cast steel.)

The linguistic principle here is that familiarity and frequency of use tend to wear verbs down into irregularity. Consider the various forms of "to be," for instance: I am, you are, he is.

But new forms tend to be treated in a way that follows the rule. Thus "forecast" and "broadcast" (an agricultural term, referring to a way of throwing out seed long before it was used in connection with radio waves) were formed on close analogy with "cast," back in the day when that short little irregular verb was still in common use.

"Podcast," which has come onto the scene really only since 2004, is less anchored in the original "cast," to throw, and seems more analogous to its almost-rhyme "broadcast," at least to those who think of "broadcast" as referring to a way of sending out electronic information, rather than scattering seed.

And so the natural conjugation for this new verb follows the regular path: I podcast, I podcasted. I found this interesting note, by the way, in a history of podcasting: "[B]logger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many 'hits' Google found for the word 'podcasts' on September 28, 2004, when the result was 24 hits. 'A year from now,' he wrote, 'it will pull up hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions.'

The Internet doesn't quite let me time-travel to last Sept. 28, but as of this morning, the figure for Google hits on "podcasts" was 337 million.

Every once in a while I run across something that makes me profoundly grateful to be a native speaker of English.

Reading the saga of May Pare, the queen of body-parts idioms, in the Los Angeles Times, was just such an occasion.

Not to disparage Ms. Pare's achievements for a moment. This university professor-turned-coffee-shop waitress-turned-author has carved out a distinctive niche for herself in popular linguistics. She's published a book called "Body Idioms and More," intended to enlighten speakers of English as a second (or third or fourth or whatever) language by explaining such baffling turns of phrase as "keeping your eyes peeled" or "using elbow grease."

See what I mean about being grateful to be a native speaker? I'm so glad I already know this stuff.

Pare (pronounced Paray) has been waitressing off and on for the better part of 30 years at Shakers, in Glendale, Calif., but in her native Thailand, she was an English specialist, even teaching at the university level. More recently, she's earned a master's degree in English as a second language (ESL) from the University of California at Los Angeles.

"She never bandied that talent around at the coffee shop. She just took notes," the Times reports, quoting her: "'I've learned a lot from just being here at the restaurant.'"

About 10 years ago, she had a light-bulb moment. Now a light bulb is not a body part, but in the spirit of this piece I should probably explain that that's the moment of "the light coming on," when a creative thinker has the new idea, sees the new solution, or whatever. It's a moment of inspiration, that sharp intake of breath (which is what inspiration is literally) associated with the "aha!" It's interesting to see that we seem to have shifted from metaphors of respiration to metaphors of illumination. This may have to do with thinkers getting stuck on a problem and seeking solace in the fridge – where they open the door and the light comes on, if only to illuminate that last piece of pie left over from dinner. But I digress.

As I was saying, the genesis of Pare's book came when she was telling her cousin a joke with an idiomatic punch line. He looked baffled. (You might say the joke went right over his head. I'm really seeing the need for this book, aren't you?) She then told him she was just pulling his leg.

That only got them in deeper.

"He didn't get it," she told the Times. "I told him this is the way people talk."

She started taking notes, and soon the book was under way. The self-published tome is in its second edition, with some revisions from coffee-shop regulars-turned-editorial consultants, and it's attracting attention from local educators.

Of course, application of elbow grease and a habit of keeping one's eyes peeled suffice not to make an English speaker fluent enough to cope amid the verbal torrents of commercial American English.

There's the matter of the right accent and pronunciation.

"Jlaik smore?"

What do you mean, you don't speak Czech? That's not Czech; it's standard American English – according to an outfit called American Accent Training: "Would you like some more?"

American Accent, which offers online and in-person training for such people such as call-center employees, introduces on its website the racy-sounding concept of "liaisons": "In American English, words are not pronounced one by one. Usually, the end of one word attaches to the beginning of the next word."

Thus, the pronunciation of "How to wreck a nice beach" is supposedly identical with that of "How to recognize speech." I'm not sure I buy it completely – I think I pronounce the hard "g" of "recognize," unless I've got a bagel in my mouth or something. But it was an eye-opener (arrghh! more body parts!) to realize that this concept I first learned in seventh-grade French ("lay zay LEV") applies to English, too.

It's another reminder of how, as speakers of our mother tongue, we are musicians who play by ear.

For those who resist the frankly commercial blandishments of companies like American Accent Training (that’s the American way, no?) there are many other online resources. There is the "Pronunciation Poem," which seems to be part of ESL folklore at this point. It begins:

Dearest creature in creation, study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

And there’s Dave Sperling’s ESL Cafe. Dave’s offers a student discussion forum for such issues as how to ask – idiomatically and correctly – about having a tennis racket restrung. Another recent post was on which question is correct: "How long did you have your dog?" and "How long have you had your dog?" A grammarian would say this is the difference between the simple past tense and the present perfect tense. A more practical approach to this one may be to ask, "Does the person you’re asking still have the dog?"

As I said – I’m so glad I already know this. Hats off to those struggling to learn it!

Over the past few decades, some of the most fraught issues in the English language, for educated people trying to do right by their mother tongue, have involved inclusive, or nonsexist, language. A number of traditional standard grammar rules seem to have been designed to put women down.

Is it proper to say, "Each student must do his own work"? Back in the days when grammar was taught in schools, that was the standard that was taught. But with women accounting for half or more of the students at a lot of institutions, the idea that the statistically "average" student was male has lost credibility.

Similarly, when enough women make it into the United States Senate that the prospect of a committee chaired by a woman is no longer just theoretical, is she a chairman, a chairwoman, or just a chair? The urge to brevity is pushing the language toward "chair," but more so, it seems, in the case of a woman than of a man. Thus we end up with Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, described variously as the chairman, chairwoman, or chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, but Alan Greenspan is fairly consistently identified as "Fed chairman."

This is the sort of thing that has prompted a reader query, "Are there languages without genders?"

Well, come to find out, there are. The Bengali language, for instance, has no genders. But before we go there, I'd like to note that a useful aspect of gender in language is that it gives an easy, convenient way to sort pronouns, which can be useful, space-saving placeholders.

Journalists are always in the market for synonyms and alternatives to keep from repeating the same words over and over. This sometimes puts them on the awkward path of what usage guru H. M. Fowler called "elegant variation." During my high school years in South Carolina, every time the local paper ran a story about the city's recreation director, a Northern transplant of Italian descent, he would invariably be referred to at some point about six or seven paragraphs in as "the Philadelphia native." His name was longer than "Smith" or "Jones," but it wasn't as long as "Philadelphia."

This is where pronouns come in handy – think of all the space you save once you've introduced Senator Collins with her full title and committee name, and then can refer to her simply as "she." Plural pronouns help, too. If you were describing the White House responding to a request from a Senate panel, for instance, you should refer to the administration as an "it" and the senators as "they" and not have to dream up six different variations on "committee." (Or you can refer to the "president's aides" as "they" and let the panel be the "it"; it doesn't matter but you have to set it up right.)

This convenience of the easily distinguishable pronoun may partially explain the use of feminine pronouns to refer to ships or storms. Among an all-male crew, "she" would obviously not refer to any of the guys.

But gender isn't just about sex and all that "chairperson" stuff. "Gender" really does mean "kind" or "sort," and refers ultimately to the ways people classify people and things. We borrow the word's French cousin, "genre," to refer to kinds of painting, or literary classifications: murder mysteries are a "genre" of fiction. A great many languages do classify nouns according to sex, but there are other ways of ordering the universe.

Some languages divide the world into animate and inanimate nouns, rational and nonrational beings, humans and nonhumans, male and others, or male human and others. Sometimes the distinctions are quite subtle. The Algonquian languages divide nouns into "animate" and "inanimate" – and they consider raspberries to be animate and strawberries inanimate. Go figure.

The Aboriginal languages of Australia are well known, in linguistic circles at least, for having four classes: men and animate things; women, fire, and dangerous things; edible fruits and vegetables; and miscellaneous things. Political guru George Lakoff, who focuses on how people's political thinking, in particular, grows out of the metaphors they embrace, picked up on this second gender and wrote a book about it, called "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."

This gets us to how "airplane" became a vegetable. In the Aboriginal language of Gurr-goni, spoken in northern Australia, there is a special gender for "edible vegetables," according to linguist Guy Deutscher in his book "The Unfolding of Language." Other plants were eventually included in this "edible" gender, he speculates, as were wooden objects, such as canoes, the Aboriginals' main means of transport.

When Gurr-goni borrowed the English word "airplane" into their language, as "erriplen," they conceived of it as a sort of flying canoe, and assigned it to the vegetable gender.

And that is how an airplane became a vegetable.

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

One of the pleasures of being in London for a few days, as I was over the Labor Day weekend, is getting to experience British newspapers directly, in the flesh (in the pulp?) as it were.

But as I sat in seat 38G of my plane on the tarmac at Heathrow, awaiting departure for the return flight, with my copy of The Guardian open in front of me, and extending into the personal air rights associated with seat 38F as well as the aisle beside me, I stumbled over a headline. I had to read it at least four times before I got it:

New academy schools fuel education row

My eye caught "fuel education," which sounded as if it could be a program of tips on how to get better mileage from gasoline. And then I read it as "schools fuel," which made me think maybe I'd stumbled onto a story about classroom buildings being shifted from coal to electric heat.

Then I focused on "academy schools," but I read "schools" as a verb, as it would be used in a (headline) sentence such as, for instance, "Academy schools children from all over city." But that's not what was going on there. It finally occurred to me that "academy" was modifying "schools," which was being used as a noun. "Academy schools" were meant to be a sort of British answer to American-style "charter schools" – publicly funded institutions outside the usual curriculum and management style, seen as an alternative to traditional state schools deemed to have failed one way or another.

I'm not sure why such a school can't be called simply an academy. "Academy schools" sounds a bit redundant. I suppose, though, that given the growing presence of home schooling, or "homeschooling," as its advocates prefer, it may not be totally absurd to say "school schooling." After all, we've learned to say things like "land line" and "onshore oil" and even "print publication."

In any case, this process of elimination left "fuel" standing as the lone candidate for the predicate verb of the sentence, and I finally made sense of the headline. It was trying to communicate the idea that these "charter schools" are causing a stir among educators.

That it took so long for me to get it in the first place was maybe my fault. But I might not have been reading the headline from right to left in the first place except that my eye had followed my right arm out into the aisle of the plane as I opened the paper up fully to be able to take it all in.

At one point, as we were about to depart, one of the flight attendant asked me to haul my sail in because it was interfering with the prevailing winds within the cabin.

No, I just made that up.

But they don't call them "broadsheets" for nothing. There's something about a paper like The Guardian that discourages furtive reading.

A word on the last word of this confusing headline: "Row" in this sense has nothing to do with taking your boat gently down the stream. This "row" rhymes with "how now" and is a staple of British headline writing: It covers, with admirable succinctness and a dash of informality, concepts otherwise expressed by Latinate polysyllables: controversy, disagreement, contention, debate, dispute.

Except for that "w" stretched open like a salesman's sample case, it's a short word, only three letters. It's even shorter than one of my favorites, "flap." And of course all these describe events or phenomena that are the very stuff of politics and journalism: Newspapers need such words the way tailors need cloth.

All these short words – bid, blast, cut, fuel, hit, score, spark, spur, strike, surge, and the rest, as well as our friend "row" – have the advantage of conciseness, beloved of headline writers. Because English doesn't go in much for inflections – special add-ons to signal that a word is a dative plural noun, or a feminine singular adjective – there aren't extra endings to have to be squeezed into a skinny column. And all these words work as either verbs or nouns. And piled up in front of other nouns, they can be pressed into service as adjectives.

In this subhead in an energy publication, for instance, "Power price surges spark row," every single word can easily be used as either a noun or a verb.

Most of the time, these work. But flexibility can sometimes lead to ambiguity, as the meaning seems to shift as you read, as happened to me on the tarmac with my newspaper.

On the other hand, once you get the hang of it, you can make up your own, and then invent stories to run under them. One can imagine an article on the controversy surrounding a cap on public spending in a community waterlogged after a major flood that everyone is already torn up about (for example): "Fiscal freeze fans flames of flood flap."

Can you come up with your own?

It is literally the first rule in the book, if the book you mean is Strunk and White's "Elements of Style": Form the possessive of singular nouns by adding an apostrophe plus "s."

What could be simpler? "The girl's dress is red." "My dog's bark is worse than his bite." "The editor's dictionary is dog-eared."

Oh, but it gets complicated. And very quickly.

The actual example of a noun forming its possessive given by Strunk and White (no, not exactly a standup comedy duo, though their usage guide has stood up well over time) involves somebody named "Charles."

They were trying to be provocative, I suspect – trying to put a marker down. "The girl's dress" would have been just too easy.

According to Strunk and White, Charles has a friend – who needs to be referred to, they insist, as "Charles's friend.""

By choosing "Charles" as their example, Strunk and White signaled that they were parting company with another school of thought, which calls for simply "Charles' friend." With its "buzzed" "s" at the end (what a phonetician would call a "voiced sibilant"), "Charles" all by itself sounds vaguely plural, and for some people, evidently, the extra "s" is just too much.

To complicate things further, consider Dashiell Hammett's detectives, Nick and Nora Charles, – the Charlesles.

All these examples: Charles, Charles's friend (or Charles' friend), the Charleses, the Charleses' house – the basic noun, the possessive, the plural, and the possessive plural – are pronounced the same, "Charl-zez."

But what's really struck me lately is the way that some writers seem to follow the "Charles rule" out the window; they seem not to know when enough is enough. They refer to the house that Jim and Sally Smith live is referred to as "the Smiths's house." Or the possessive of "the United States" is construed as "the United States's." Argh! "States" is already the plural of "state" (as "Charles" is not the plural of "Charle"), and plurals form their possessive with the simple addition of an apostrophe. No additional "s" is needed. Similarly, it seems, one should be able to speak or write of "Universal Studios' latest project" or "Lehman Brothers' annual report."

And what do we do in the case of a reporter for a newspaper called "The Times"? It's a phrase that often shows up in newspaper names. It seems to suggest "the times in which we live" – our era, so to speak, or, as another newspaper name has it, "The Age." ("D'you know The Age of Melbourne?" "Oh, about 170, I'd guess; remember they had the Olympics there in 1956.") "Times" in this sense is a plural noun that doesn't have a singular any more than "scissors" do – or does.

But when a paper is called "the Times," does the "Lehman Brothers" rule apply? Not quite. At some point there were, presumably, actual brothers named "Lehman" who can be construed as the original possessors of the firm that bears their name. But the "times" of London or New York or Los Angeles do not "possess" newspaper reporters, not even in the sense that the dog possesses its bark or its bite (see above). It's better to go with an adjectival form: "The Times reporter."

I know, by the way, I'm not making a very strong case for this other rule, but I do want to note that there is more than one way of looking at some of these issues, and that people who write "Charles' friend" do not necessarily have horns. Such people are, however, subject to revision at many publications, including this one.

Once upon a time, back in the 17th or 18th century, well before I was even in grade school, English grammarians had high hopes for their language. They wanted to polish it like marble and make it follow the rules of Latin grammar. For one thing, they tried to stamp out the practice of ending sentences with prepositions – a fussiness that Winston Churchill famously dismissed (according to legend, anyway) as nonsense up with which he would not put.

And they wanted to mend split infinitives, to banish any interloping modifier intruding upon the sweet unity of a verb with its preceding "to." They would have cringed at one of the most famous split infinitives of contemporary pop culture, the Star Trek motto "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

That "boldly" is misplaced! I can imagine a gaggle of grammarians gasping in horror. "The 'to' and the 'go' should adhere like glue! Away with the 'boldly'! It belongs after 'go'!"

Now just