When a friend showed up without me at one of our usual hangouts the other week, it was remarked that she was therefore "ruthless."

We had a chuckle over it but it sparked a discussion: Why do some words seem to be used only in the negative? Dictionaries do list "ruthful," but how often do you hear it in conversation? Or see it in print?

It's derived from "ruth" as a common noun, meaning compassion for the misery of another. A second meaning is sorrow for one's own faults. A synonym for this sense is "remorse," rooted in Latin words for "biting again," which provide vivid mental imagery for that "gnawing" feeling that can come after a bad decision or a foolish course of action.

All of which is enough to make me point out that although scholars are divided on the exact etymology of "Ruth" as a given name, I've found no source that traces it to the common noun.

"Listless" is another one of these verbal odd socks. It does not refer to the way you feel when you get to the supermarket and realize you have left your shopping list on the kitchen counter. ("I can just picture it there where I must have left it! Now if only I can make out whether it had 'balsamic vinegar' on it!")

No, the list you're lacking when you're truly listless is desire. "The wind bloweth where it listeth." The wind blows where it wants to, we might say today. "List" is a word-kin to "lust," which originally meant simply "desire" but has so narrowed that it really can't be used nowadays except to describe desires of the baser sort. (That's Gresham's Law at work in the verbal marketplace – "bad" meanings driving the good ones out.)

(In other Germanic languages, "lust" has retained its innocence. "We're going out to the movies later; wanna come with us? Hättest Du Lust, mitzukommen?)

We speak of a damaged ship as "listing" – leaning before it keels over and sinks. This usage, too, seems to be linked to the idea that the ship tilts in the direction it "desires" to go – as if, with its hull punctured by a torpedo, it has any choice in the matter. A number of verbs – list, lean, tilt, incline – combine a sense of a physical "moving toward" with a metaphorical one.

Remember the joke about the listener who called into the radio station to request that piece by Mozart, "I'm Inclined to Knock Music"?

"Unwittingly" is another word we meet more often than its positive counterpart: "Unfamiliar with the security system in his brother-in-law's house, he opened a window in the guest room and unwittingly set off an alarm." It suggests lack of intent. It's built on the archaic verb "wit," which means "to know."

But when, in the public square, we need to be sure we're not talking about just joking around, we tend to go to the more direct and modern "knowingly." I've just done a Google News check: knowingly, 5,510 hits; wittingly, 72.

The most interesting "wittingly" I found was biblical: Jacob "guiding his hands wittingly" as he blessed Joseph's sons, giving the younger Ephraim the blessing that might have been expected to go to first-born Manasseh. "The old man knew what he was doing" is the clear message of the text.

"Couth" and "kempt" are a couple of words people sometimes throw around for laughs. Couth, though, seems to be a back formation - a word formed by removing elements from already existing longer words. "Kempt," on the other hand, seems to be an actual archaic word, derived from the idea of "well-combed" – which is where that "m" comes from.

It turns out there's a word for this kind of thing - well, sort of: azygous, a term usually used in the natural sciences to refer to elements such as leaves or veins that are "unpaired," or as the Oxford English Dictionary quaintly puts it, "fellowless."

I discovered this on a website that also reproduced a piece from The New Yorker called "How I Met My Wife."

"Coolth," as a counterpart to "warmth," is another word I wanted to check out after my initial "ruthless" discussion. It I'd read that the Elizabethans had coolth, but that it had fallen out of the language since. After a bit of research, I've confirmed that earlier coolth, but also found that the word has made a modest comeback in our own day.

Some of them appear in earnest scientific papers; others in blogs whose authors aren't sure it's a real word (and who seem not to know about online dictionaries in which to check out such an unknown). Usually "coolth" is used to mean literal temperature; once in a while it's used to mean "state of coolness," in the "hey, man, cool!" sense of the word.

Coolth, it seems, liveth.

A communications officer at one of greater Boston's many fine universities lamented aloud a few weeks ago that he no longer has much occasion to use the term "decanal." (He pronounced it to rhyme with "McCain'll," as in "McCain'll probably run in '08.")

He used to use it all the time, he said, but he's recently moved from one school to another, and among the new colleagues, there doesn't seem to be much use of this particular d-word.

"Decanal" was a new one on me. It sounds like something that might involve a dental drill, or maybe municipal water mains and storm drains. ("The triangle below decanal"? It looks good on the page, but doesn't scan for the inner ear.) It turns out that "decanal" is an adjective that means "of or pertaining to a dean": decanal communications, for instance.

"The dean's communications" would probably be the more straightforward way to refer to them. But how wonderful to have exactly the right adjective to go with the noun. In about a nanosecond I went from "I've never heard of that before" to "I understand why you miss getting to use it."

In the polysyllabic world of academia, where 50-cent words are a dime a dozen, "dean" sounds positively Anglo-Saxon. But its adjectival brother, decanal, gives away the family's Latin and Greek ancestry: It's rooted in the idea of "the head of a group of 10," with the same "dec" root as in decade and decimal. There's a "deca" root in Greek, too, that also means "ten," as you may recall from decahedrons in geometry class.

Later on, as I crossed the Charles River, another example of what we might call underemployed adjectives came to mind.

It's "riparian." It rhymes with "contrarian" and refers to the banks of a river.

It arguably sounds as if it might be a euphemism for senior citizens: "After his boffo stump speech yesterday at the assisted living facility, Mayor Blowhard clearly has the riparian vote all locked up."

But actually this adjective is useful to describe, say, "riparian trees" or "riparian societies" - those that grow up along the banks of a river.

Our more ordinary word "arrive" is a relative: Its original meaning was to come to shore, to reach the other bank (or "rive," as they say in French, as in Rive Gauche, Left Bank) of a river. Even our word "rival" is connected – "rivals" are etymologically "those who use the same stream." It's a good metaphor to express both closeness and competitiveness, isn't it?

Another just-right special-occasion adjective – one we should have seen more of during the midterm election campaign - is "psephological." It sounds like "psychological" except with a "seef" instead of a "sike" at the beginning. It's the adjective formed from psephology, a Greek-derived word meaning the scientific study of voting - or literally, "the study of pebbles," since the ancient Greeks used pebbles to vote. (No touchscreens for the Athenians, thank you.)

When I Googled "psephological," though, I got mostly dictionary definitions. The best example of it in actual use was in a blog post last year by a village councilor in the north of England, taking someone to task for his article in the Socialist Worker.

What this tells me is that "psephological" has a lot of unrealized potential. It's just waiting for the next election season – which, in the United States, always begins the day after the last election season.

Part of what's up with words is that numbers are becoming stand-ins for words, and not just any old words either. I'm talking about something beyond using a number (411) as slang for an ordinary noun (information). I'm talking here about numbers that become proper names, descriptors we use to identify ourselves, in terms of geography and status.

In many cases such numbers can pack quite an emotional punch.

This realization crystallized for me the other day when I was off absorbing culture at a place called Mass MOCA. I know it sounds like something you might get at your favorite coffee place after you've racked up a lot of frequent-drinker points – a giant mélange of java and cocoa! Invite all your friends!

But it's actually the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in a former factory complex in the town of North Adams. At our lunch break in one of the cafes there, I couldn't resist glancing at the headlines on the newspaper abandoned at the next table, a well-read copy of that day's Berkshire Eagle.

And I couldn't help noticing that it calls its feature section "The 413." Well, sure. Why not? That's the telephone area code for western Massachusetts – one of the original area codes, going back to 1947, with no "overlay" with another code: 413 reigns supreme and unique within its region. "The 413" certainly takes up a lot less space on a page than "Things That Are Happening in Western Massachusetts."

Still, one has to ask, how strongly do people identify with their area code?

In the case of 313, just one digit over on the keypad, the answer, apparently, is "quite strongly." Time was when 313 was the area code for all of metropolitan Detroit. But as its suburbs have been hived off into their own new area codes (a process familiar in other areas as faxes and cellphones have proliferated), "the 313" has become shorthand for one of the largest African-American communities in the United States. That, in turn, has made it a very fashionable number for those in the hip hop community, Wikipedia reports.

Residents of "the 3-1-3" may pride themselves on being "real" Detroiters, "a notion that was reinforced in the film 8 Mile," starring rapper Eminem.

Exactly what one does in response to a "fashionable" area code isn't completely clear. Some people may choose to move into its territory, I suppose.

Or one can wear one's area code. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an item a while back on its home city's area code, 206, as a fashion statement on a local boutique's offerings of tank tops and camisoles.

Perhaps the most recognized area code is 212. It once covered New York City but with area-code proliferation now concentrates its energies on Manhattan. New York was designated "212" when area codes were introduced because that was the fastest three-digit number that could be dialed on a rotary phone under the technical restrictions of the day, which limited the use of "1" in codes.

"Area Code 212" is the title of a recent compilation of essays by Tama Janowitz, and it's surprising that someone felt a subtitle was in order: "New York Days, New York Nights." (Someone was thinking of sales in the overseas market, perhaps?)

The other kind of number that defines Americans is the ZIP code. (That's all capital letters as an acronym for "zone improvement plan," by the way.) The most famous example has got to be "Beverly Hills, 90210," the TV show that did more than anything to turn "Dylan" and "Brandon" into hot-ticket names for baby boys in Sweden (where both names had been till then unknown).

According to Wikipedia, "90210 is the most familiar ZIP code for people who live outside the United States. It is often used to sign up [online] for services intended only for US residents."

ZIP codes, covering a smaller territory, tend to be more homogeneous, more "characterizable," if that's a word, than area codes.

A Yale Daily News article looking into whether Yalies tend to come mostly from affluent communities (the unsurprising finding: yes, they do) included this:

Zip codes are the smallest geographical areas for which the Census Bureau releases data, and are considered meaningful tools for analyzing community characteristics, according to a Census Bureau spokesman.

Except for a handful of really well-known codes, though, most ZIP snippiness and snobbery is pretty local. The Washington-area competitions like that between Georgetown (20007) and Old Town Alexandria (22314), for instance, had eluded me until I began to research this topic. (Still, wouldn't it be cool to be able to give your ZIP as "two-triple-oh-seven"?) Ditto the chase between Chevy Chase 20015 and Chevy Chase 20815, on the Maryland side. And what about Great Falls 22066 vs. Potomac 20854? The latter, by the way, was once the tentative title for the show that became "Beverly Hills, 90210."

There may be something odd but very human about becoming emotionally attached to a number that was developed for a strictly technical purpose.  This becomes especially apparent in a foreign country, where one knows enough of what's going on to appreciate it intellectually but remains detached emotionally.

When I was in Ireland a number of years ago I interviewed a demographer spoke of "Dublin 2" in a tone of voice that signaled a prestige number. Come to find out there's a rivalry between the Northside and the Southside in Dublin, with generally odd (that is, uneven) postal codes north of the River Liffey, and even codes to the south.

There's also a bit of folklore that the Phoenix Park, where Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of the president of Ireland, is located, has a Dublin 8 address, even though it's on the Northside, because it would be unsuitable for the president to have an unfashionable odd (that is to say, again, uneven) postal code.

The whole system is to be changed in 2008, though, organized along administrative rather than geographical lines.

What will the demographers and market analysts make of the new system? It may take a while, but I won't be surprised if they figure out a way to slice and dice the neighborhoods of dear old Dublin by the numbers. Then, perhaps, tony boutiques can sell Eblana 726 tank tops.

If the Polish plumber is back, will he be accompanied by his sometime friend, the "Estonian electrician"?

As noted in this space last week, "Polish plumbers" has long been a shorthand for Eastern Europeans who hit the road in search of better economic opportunities within the European Union, of which Poland is a new member.

Last week EU ministers agreed – subject to final approval by the European Parliament – that members of a number of skilled trades and professions, including plumbers, will be given "pan-European freedom to provide services." And so countries like Britain and France are likely to see more of the Estonian electrician in the years ahead.

But excuse me: Why does the "Estonian electrician" not have much of a charge? I don't mean personally, but come on. As a rhetorical device, this one has its wires crossed: Two e's do not stack up against the "Polish plumber," with its popping p's – suggestive of the burst pipes to be repaired perhaps?

For a start, the "e" of "Estonian" is supposed to be the short "e" of "get." The initial "e" of "electrician" is supposed to be a long "e" as in "eel." Not the same sound! OK, the Oxford English Dictionary gives a short "e" as a second pronunciation, but the reality is that both initial "e's" are unstressed vowels.

In English, unstressed vowels tend to gravitate toward the condition of the schwa, as Webster's New World College Dictionary explains, "the neutral mid-central vowel of most unstressed syllables in English." The schwa – the word itself comes from the Hebrew for "nought," which tells you something right there – is the "a" of "ago," the "e" of "agent," the "i" of "sanity," and so on.

This explains why many educated people would have trouble remembering whether it's "indispensable" or "indispensible" if they didn't have spelling gnomes inside their computers. Either spelling would be pronounced the same way.

In any case, this whole business made me want to confirm what I thought I knew about alliteration and assonance, which are the literary devices at issue here.

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words, or, more strictly, at the beginning of stressed syllables: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers."

Consonance, as a literary device, is the repetition of consonant sounds, especially end consonants, in close proximity. Assonance is the usual term for the repetition of vowel sounds.

Robert Frost’s poetry is rich with examples of all of these "sound devices." His "Nothing Gold Can Stay" includes the lines, "…leaf subsides to leaf./So Eden sank to grief." There's rhyme there, obviously, but "Eden" and "grief" make for assonance, too.

I'm reaching back to the poems of high school English class as a way to think about the language of contemporary journalism because it's important to remember that language was spoken, and heard, before it was written. The word "language" derives from "tongue," as in the human body part, and "tongue" itself can be used to mean "language," as in "speaking in foreign tongues." However important writing is, it shouldn't silence the music of speech.

Whoever writes "Estonian electrician" is paying attention to the look of the letters rather than the sounds of the words they represent. The American Heritage Dictionary has this to say about alliteration:

Modern alliteration is predominantly consonantal; certain literary traditions, such as Old English verse, also alliterate using vowel sounds.

Does this mean I'm being too hard on the "Estonian electrician"? Perhaps. But then again, nah. A schwa is too weak to count. In Hebrew, it's nothing at all.

It was just a short piece on the radio the other day, about how some people take pains to make themselves invisible on the Internet. They don’t use their real names in chat rooms, the writer for Wired News explained to the NPR host; they don’t join clubs that put their newsletters online. If they do run across themselves on the Internet, they may tweak their names slightly to slip back under the radar of the search engines.

What struck me most about it, though, and seems to have given everyone I’ve discussed it with a chuckle, is the term used in the interview to describe these people cloaked in privacy. They are “ungooglable,” or, as Wired rendered it, “unGoogleable.” (My own preference for a word that is being absorbed into the vernacular would be to lowercase it and drop that middle "e." Google's lawyers are probably not happy with any of this.)

As Ann Harrison wrote in Wired News:

As the internet makes greater inroads into everyday life, more people are finding they're leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web - where Google's merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name. Our growing Googleability has already changed the face of dating and hiring, and has become a real concern to spousal-abuse victims and others with life-and-death privacy needs.

And so quickly: The company is less than 10 years old.

By contrast, the humble English word “ship,” as a common noun – very common indeed in the language of a seafaring nation – goes back to the early 8th century. But the oldest citation the Oxford English Dictionary gives for “ship” as a verb in the sense of sending or transporting (goods) by ship dates from 1436: “Saffron, quiksilver … is shipped into Fflaundres fulle craftylye.”

The transition that took seven centuries with “ship” has taken less than a decade with “Google”: “I only ever met him at the coffee shop, so I thought I’d better Google him before our first real date.”

"Google" has been successful as a corporate name because it's been successful as a corporation, of course, but the sound of the word explains part of its appeal, too. It was coined as a variation on "googol," the invented term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was intended as a vast unimaginable number that "everyone" would try to imagine, as the Math Forum at Drexel University explains.

But "Google" works as well as it does for reasons utterly unmathematical. The "oo" sound is heard in words like goofy and doofus and loopy. Barney Google and his friend Snuffy Smith live on, but don't exactly represent the highbrow end of the funny pages.

"Google" fits in easily among a group of words that swing into action as either nouns or verbs: giggle, wiggle, waffle, chuckle, fizzle, tickle – they're not in the dictionary marked "slang", but you don't expect to run across them in, say, a Supreme Court opinion. Whatever "googling" is, it can't possibly be anything that's hard to do.

Corporate names like "American Telephone and Telegraph Company" or "Ford Motor Company" all but cried out to be carved into stone. Compare – and try to explain – eBay, Amazon, and the self-punctuating Yahoo!

Google, like Xerox and FedEx before it, illustrates the paradox of trademark success. The photocopy, in its day, helped flatten the information hierarchy – as anyone who ever received the fifth carbon copy of an important document can attest. FedEx built a business by knowing where things were in transit, but it became a verb of the people when it demonstrated that for few dollars more, that belatedly purchased birthday gift could actually get there on time.

Such trade names don't just define leading companies; they suggest new words to go with the new processes they provide. But when they lend their names to the common speech, the companies sometimes have trouble getting them back.

American history has been the history of people in motion.

As the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast struggles to rebuild, many of those who fled the region are now finding their future in a different place. However dreadful the circumstances of its launch, this wave of migration, like other such waves before it, has the potential for being a great adventure.

At what we might call the retail level, Katrina's diaspora across the country could mean that some Utahns get to see dreadlocks in person for the first time. It will mean the quality of live jazz available rises significantly in many places. And I can't help thinking the great gumbo of accents and influences that is America's spoken language is about to get a mighty stir.

Not that the pot hasn't already been stirred and seasoned with the verbal spice of migrants and immigrants from all over. Sometimes a single characteristic sound or usage pops up in two very different places – the Scottish-influenced "oo" for "ou" ("aboot the hoose") that is heard in Canada is also found in Virginia, for instance.

Similarly, the characteristic New Orleanian accent, sometimes known as "Yat," turns out to have a fair bit in common with "Brooklynese," including the "er" sound that gets pronounced "oi" – as in "Toity-toid Street." Archie Bunker, look out.

The "oi" for "er" substitution isn't part of the Southern accents you hear in the movies. But from the audio archive of memory, I can summon up a couple of voices from my teen years in South Carolina in which that was a distinctive feature. Both cases were of people born probably before 1920, and in one case, very possibly before the turn of the century. I can't recall their having a specific connection to New Orleans, but I do recall one senior lady who spoke of "church work" as "choich woik," and somewhere I'd read that this was a characteristic of New Orleans.

Here's what I found out online about the New Orleans accent:

It is similar to a New York "Brooklynese" accent to people unfamiliar with it. There are many theories to how the accent came to be, but it likely results from New Orleans' geographic isolation by water, and the fact that New Orleans was a major port of entry into the United States throughout the 19th century.

My research enlightened me about "Yat" – people of New Orleans, who greet each other with "Where y'at?" instead of "How are you?" Some see it as a pejorative. But another source called it a"colloquial demonym," and how about that? "Demonym " turns out to be a term for the inhabitants of a place, literally "the name of a people."

And as for "New Orleans" itself – is there a city name that has more semiofficial correct pronunciations? A few weeks ago, when the news was all Katrina all the time, one could sometimes hear four or five different versions of "New Orleans" within a single top-of-the-hour news bulletin: It would start with "Noo OR lins," "Noo Or-LEANS," and Noo OR-lee-ans," and go on from there.

A little Web surfing confirms that I'm not the only one to notice this embarrassment of riches:

In a city whose very name is pronounced in nearly 100 different ways by its citizens, all the way from the filigreed, nearly five-syllable "Nyoo Ahhlyins" to the monosyllabic grunt of "Nawln," it takes a very sensitive ear, not to mention years of practice, to pinpoint the incredible binds the native speaker encounters, those specific words where the slow tongue gives up and makes a leap of faith.

I have a theory that a lot of people encounter the name of the city first in a song as they're growing up, and they tend to pronounce it the way it's pronounced in that song. If you grew up with "The City of New Orleans," that great tune about riding the rails, you have to say "Noo ORlins." If you grew up with "The House of the Rising Sun," you've got to call it "New or LEANS" or it won't scan, or rhyme with "bluejeans" in the third verse.

Americans in motion have been listening to the music of one another's voices for centuries as one accent has rubbed against another. If in the months ahead you hear an expatriate New Orleanian looking for "woik," you'll understand what's meant.

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote. On a family visit to South Carolina last weekend, I was reminded that good porches make good neighbors, too.

On a perfect spring evening, warm and uncharacteristically unsticky, it occurred to us that the perfect place to adjourn to after dinner was not the living room but the front porch of the grandparents' renovated gingerbread Victorian. After all, there are those wonderful wicker rockers out there, and the porch swing. The next time we're all together like this, we thought, the humidity may force us back into the refuge of air conditioning.

And so we went out to sit and rock and swing and chat and keep an eye on the passing scene. It was a connection with the neighborhood we wouldn't have made had we stayed inside or gone out into the backyard.

A porch is an example of what sociologists, artists, and other students of human behavior call a "liminal space" – a transitional space, in this case, between the private space of the home and the public space of the street. A table at a sidewalk café has a similar dual identity. So, on a larger scale, does an airport: Once there, one has left home but not yet really embarked on one's trip.

A porch may conjure up notions of comfortable sociability and relaxation, but the word is cousin to "port" – as in harbor, as in gate; as in door; as in porter, in the sense of gatekeeper. "Portal" is another member of this family, a fancy Latin-derived term that has found new life in the age of the Internet. Not long ago it usually referred to a grand and imposing entrance to a building. Nowadays it's more often a website positioning itself as an entrance to other sites on the Internet. Note how the "gatekeeper" function lives on in cyberspace.

Another relative, in a more distant branch of the family, is "portcullis," the heavy metal (in the original sense of that phrase) grate that can be let down to close off the entrance of a medieval castle. Porches may be about opening up; a portcullis is definitely about closing down.

There are even some nit-pickers who see the "port" in "opportunity" as a "door" and conclude that the phrase "window of opportunity" is therefore redundant. A window in a door? Maybe they're thinking of a half-door. Other sources trace "opportunity" as referring to a good time to sail into harbor, because the wind is blowing that way anyway.

Whatever its lexicographical kin may be, the porch of the old South has a conceptual relative in the big cities of the Northeast: stoop. This is a Dutch-derived term that has worked its way into North American English. Seldom does a stoop have much in the way of seating options, and "kids hanging out on the stoop" may not suggest as positive an experience as "neighbors sitting on the front porch."

But there is a connection between the two, and it has been made by, among others, Frank J. Dmuchowski, a proud son of Brooklyn, in an essay posted online. Describing the role of "the Stoop" in the life of a very small child, he writes:

When you were old enough to go solo from your apartment, the Stoop provided a safe haven from which to venture onto the sidewalk and to the world. You were not able to stray too far from the safety of the Stoop's harbor until you clearly demonstrated mastery of the skills needed to navigate the sidewalk. You were watched and closely supervised, not only by members of your own family, but also by both neighbor adults and older kids on the block.

Hmm. Sounds pretty liminal to me. And obviously neighborly, too. Mr. Dmuchowski has since moved to rural Wisconsin, and he says he feels right at home: He knows all about the small-town front porches because he grew up with a stoop.

Instead of a porch, newer houses are likely to feature a deck, a private space behind a house, so named for its resemblance to the deck of a ship – conceptually the opposite of the harbor-like porch or stoop.

The feature of the postwar suburban subdivision in which I grew up that came closest to Mr. Dmuchowski's stoop was, oddly, the grape-stake fences enclosing our backyards. "Privacy" was an important concept in those days, for the adults, anyway. For us kids, though, growing up with no climbing trees to speak of, the fences provided an outlet for our exploratory urges. The upper horizontal rails – maybe about six feet off the ground, flat, and easily wide enough for our little feet – made for elevated pathways that let us go from one backyard to another. The fences thus made for what homeland security experts call a "porous border." What had been built to close us in ended up connecting us.

Controversy rages in the heartland: Should youth baseball leagues use bats made of aluminum – or of wood? Aluminum has been likened to steroids in its ability to turn a middling player into a power hitter, but some critics charge that all that power can be dangerous, and the risk of accident just isn't worth the risk to the kids.

Controversy raged – briefly – on the copy desk: Are those nonmetallic bats that the critics want youth baseball to return to "wood bats" – or "wooden bats"? Inquiring minds wanted to know, as our story went to press last month.

The dictionary logic of "wooden bats" is unassailable. "Wood" is a noun; "wooden" is the adjective that means "made of wood." In a phrase like "wood nymph," "wood" is what's called an attributive noun, describing where the nymph lives, not what she's made of.

But the baseball guys in the newsroom say the lingo is "wood bats." A quick search at Googlefight.com, which scours Google pages to facilitate comparisons like this, has just brought up 33,100 hits for "wood bats" vs. 25,100 for "wooden bats."

Here's some informed speculation about what's going here:

In the beginning, all bats were made of wood. But the emergence of aluminum bats from about 1970 onward forced the coinage of a retronym, a new term to describe bats that were not aluminum. (Same process for "acoustic guitar" and "analog watch.")

But is that bat wooden – or just wood? That "en" ending, which signals an adjective meaning "made of," is disappearing from the language. "An earthen pitcher," for instance, is one made of "earth," or clay, as we are more likely to say nowadays. Other adjectives with "en" are disappearing, too: I need to polish my oak (not "oaken") bureau, and to pick up some silk (not "silken") thread to sew a button back on my blouse.

Another way of saying this is that we're relying more on attributive nouns nowadays – witness our friend the wood nymph. This is why we see headline constructions such as "Japan, China leaders to meet," as we did last month before the big summit in Indonesia.

Whatever. At this point the bat – whether aluminum or the traditional northern ash, I will leave to your imagination – connects solidly with a long-term trend for a line drive deep into left field: Just as it is becoming necessary to connect the terms "wood" and "bat," that little syllable "en" starts heading for the showers, and the phrase on the lips of the people is "wood bat." Had aluminum bats established themselves earlier – as they might have done, since as a "technology" they go back to the 1920s, "wooden bat" might today be the more popular term.

I find myself reluctant to let go of those adjectival "en" endings altogether.

Why so? They soften the rhythm of a phrase into the natural iambic meter of English (ta-DA, ta-DA): "a golden thread." The "en" lives on in the metaphorical meanings of many words: "a wooden speaker" or "a leaden sky" (vs. "lead paint"). The "en" seems to go into the realm of the poetic, or at least folkloric: "Don't take any wooden nickels" (ca. 1920s).

But replaying in my mind's ear the "en" words I've known, I've remembered one I haven't thought of for years: "olden times." It was a term my playmates and I used as children, still in single digits, before we had had any "history" in school (prehistoric?) to try to sort out the different layers of the past we were being exposed to, through family lore, of course, but also via television, movies, and (this being southern California) theme parks. We might have said "the old days" to refer to "the time before we started kindergarten," but "olden times" covered that period definitely outside personal memory but possibly within living memory of parents and grandparents.

The phrase sounds utterly quaint today, and maybe it did then, too, without my realizing it. The young friend with whom I most associate it had family roots in Tennessee, and I may have unwittingly picked up a regionalism. I'm glad to be reminded of "olden times," before it slips completely back into, well, "olden times."

A report in the Monitor's pages of a young musician who associates musical intervals with specific flavors on her tongue was a fascinating example of what scientists call synesthesia - a response in one sensory mode to a stimulus in another. Associating musical tones with colors is one of the most common types of synesthesia, but the musician my esteemed colleague wrote about identifies a perfect fourth with mown grass, for instance, and a minor sixth with cream.

Hey, whatever it takes to keep you on pitch. (I would have expected cream to be a major sixth myself.)

Synesthesia is perhaps one of the further-out branches of a topic I've been paying some attention to over the past few years: the vocabulary of sensory impression.

A shared experience is a validated experience, whether it's, "Do you see that red-winged blackbird way over there?" or "Did you feel the chill in the room after she made that comment about his ex-wife?"

Hence the value of being able to describe one's experiences as fully as possible. After all, if I can't be sure that my "red" is the same as your "red," what hope do we have that "our democracy," for instance, can possibly be "their democracy"?

I'm not always sure whether it's synesthesia or just confusion that governs some people's description of sensory perception. During last year's presidential campaign I heard a great sound bite from a fortunate resident of one of those "battleground" communities where electoral outcomes are not foregone conclusions, and where office-seekers actually come calling in order to court voters: "We're tactile," a man told a radio reporter. "We like to see our candidates."

What he presumably meant by "see" was "see in person," which gives an opportunity to "press the flesh," as they say on the political hustings, and that, of course, is legitimately described as "tactile." (For extra credit, discuss the relationship between "pressing the flesh" and "putting the squeeze on" someone.)

Speaking of tactility – I'm struck by how often I hear or read of people speaking of something having this or that kind of "feel" where I would expect it to have a "look" (a movie, for instance) or a "sound" instead.

A film reviewer in the Midwest blasts a recent Hollywood release:

The movie has the feel of a mass of indifferent footage that was salvaged by heavy editing and dialogue dubbing.

And The Guardian had this to say about Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally's latest:

Whether intentionally or not, The Tyrant's Novel has the feel of a book written in a hurry.

Hmm. Is "feel" the right sense to invoke to discuss a novel? Perhaps – in that a novelist can create a whole world the reader more or less moves into until the book is finished.

In the world of Harry Potter fandom, meanwhile, there's a bit of buzz about the soundtrack for the next "Harry" film that manages to fuse – or confuse – sound, sight, and touch.

"A number of John Williams' original themes will be in the soundtrack, including Hedwig's Theme with a "darker feel."

The Akron Beacon Journal recently ran a story on the stage set for a dinner-theater production of "Beauty and the Beast." The article described how the musical is meant for adults, and quoted the artistic director as saying, "It's definitely a darker feel than the movie.''

Here we go again, I thought.

But it turns out he really meant it. The show was designed to spill out into the audience. "[Director] Cercone wants the show to be a sensory experience. 'You can touch, you can smell, you can taste if you wanted to.'''

It sounds as if he is in touch with his feelings, after all.

There's a useful German word I wish I could bring with me to the supermarket in Boston: knapp. It means "scant," not quite, a little on the light side. "Knapp ein Kilo" at the meat counter means "not quite a kilo" and it's a great way to exercise portion control at the source by forestalling the butcher's inevitable query, "OK if it's a little over?"

Maybe I'm being cynical. But come on. They sell Black Forest ham and corned beef and prosciutto by the slice all day long, week in, week out. Am I supposed to believe they couldn't get it right to the gram if they wanted to? A little bit here, a little bit there, and by the end of the day they've sold the equivalent of a whole extra cow that no one was really in the market for. "OK if it's a little over?" Well, no, not if I've asked for "knapp ein Kilo." When I lived in Bonn, the German butcherfolk seemed to get this point. But their counterparts in North America seem not to. "A scant pound? Hunh?" Moral of the story: It's not enough for a word to be in the dictionary. It's got to be installed on the hard drive between the ears.

Supermarket soundscapes

The large North American supermarket has a distinctive soundscape of its own. Like that of many other public spaces, it has been altered by the cellphone. Navigating from aisle to aisle, we overhear bits of conversation as Designated Shopper consults with Base Camp: "I’m on the peanut butter aisle. Is it crunchy or smooth that's the one I like?"

But a much older feature of the supermarket soundscape is the public address announcement. It typically breaks into the supermarket music (like elevator music, only adapted to a larger space) that one hasn't noticed one was paying attention to, and consists of a sort of bark, or occasionally a kind of plea, along the lines of "Steve Jones to produce," or maybe "Bob Smith to Aisle 13 for customer assistance." These Steves and Bobs and their brethren and sistern keep the supermarkets of the nation on track.

The variation on this theme that I heard the other week was, "Muhammad, price check, Register 5."

Not Steve or Bob. Not even Julio or Antonio, or what would have been likely in my neighborhood, Sergei or Vladimir. No, Muhammad. If there has been any single moment over the past several years that crystallized my awareness of Muslims in America, present and part of the community, this was it: hearing that cashier call out for help from somebody named Muhammad.

The one I’m waiting for next will come at a restaurant: "Call me Ishmael. I’ll be your server this evening."

Shopping in two languages

Canada has long been officially bilingual, which means, among other things, equal opportunity labeling, French and English, on all manner of packaged grocery items. When I lived in overwhelmingly Anglophone Toronto, there were times I was tempted to bring things home from the market that I really didn't need just because I was charmed by their French names. Thus the rather grand "batonnets au fromage" for cheese doodles, for example. And what about "croustilles"? It's a great word for potato chips. With the hard "c" and the uvular "r," it's definitely crunchier than its English counterpart. It was almost enough to get me to start buying them again. Bilingual labeling has forced food companies to translate a North American lifestyle into French, and the French, as a civilization, are collectively horrified at the way (North) Americans eat. So it seems especially amusing to me that there are all these elegant-sounding names for comestibles so alien to the culture they're being translated into.

The most glorious example of supermarket labels that read better in French, though, has to be free-range eggs.

The English phrase is something I first encountered many years ago in the Cotswolds in England, where every other charming farmstead I drove past seemed to be offering “free range eggs.” It struck me as awfully generous of them to be giving them away like that; no wonder the farmers are having trouble making ends meet. Then it finally dawned on me that "free" referred only to the "range" and not to the eggs. (It's one of those rare cases where inserting a hyphen into a compound adjective like "free range," as has become commonplace is recent years, actually clarifies meaning.)

But in Canada, the bilingual labels on free-range eggs referred to eggs laid by free-range chickens – in French, "poules en liberté." Does that not sound grand? ("Liberated chickens," on the other hand, sounds like a contradiction in terms.) And if "en liberté," why not egalité et fraternité while we're at it? Can't you just picture the flock of hens, each wrapped in a little tricolor, strutting around the barnyard to the strains of "La Marseillaise"?

"Allons poulets de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé."

Have you ever noticed that some words sound like what they mean? I don't mean just the obvious onomatopoeia of snap, crackle, pop. Some language sounds seem to be connected with certain meanings. Notice how many upward-soaring words have a long "i" sound – fly, sky, high, spire. Or how many ditzy little words have the short "i" of, well, "ditzy" or "little": bits, kids, chips. Compare the sound of "potato chips" vs. "pork chops." Which one sounds like more substantial victuals?

But the sound that most strikes me is the short "u" – the "u" of "putt," that is, not "put." I find out the "putt" sound is known to phoneticians as an "open mid back unrounded" vowel. But let's just call it the blunt "u" for short. It's characteristic of English, and utterly absent, as far as I can tell, from any of our linguistic near neighbors, including German and Dutch.

What's so special about this blunt "u"? Well, it's a sound that comes into play to discuss some of the base realities of human life. The blunt "u" is the sound of dust and mud and stuff and junk, and scum and feeling crummy on a dull day.

It's the sound of bumbling and bungling, of being taken for a chump, of taking a drubbing, of getting dumped by your sweetie, of flubbing your lines or flunking a test, of frumpy attire, of muffing an opportunity, of getting punched in the nose, of slumming and slumping and stubbing your toe. It's fussing and "cussing," (to use the colloquial pronunciation, from which the "r" has completely disappeared.) And it's "plug ugly," too.

The "open mid back unrounded" vowel is the sound of thunder and drum rolls, but also of a dull thud in the next room, or a blunt rebuke.

In forms of personal address, it's "bub," or maybe "buster," or down South, "Bubba": "You'd better move your car, bub, or I'm gonna write you up a ticket." It's not quite the same as being announced by the butler, is it?

The blunt "u" sound isn't all bad news; it's the sound of "love," of fun in the sun with your buddies – or your chums. It's "hugs" and "money," but also "funny money," which rhymes so perfectly you know you'd better watch out.

Let's say the blunt "u" is very much grounded; not flashy, but solid. Even its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, an inverted "v," seems to have both feet on the ground. It gets the job done. But it sometimes has an image problem. Compare the Anglo-Saxon "chunk" and the French-derived "slice." Which would you rather serve to company?

The tension within the English language between workaday Anglo-Saxon and highfalutin French goes back to the Norman Conquest. In an e-mail exchange with me this week, Melinda Menzer, associate professor of English at Furman University in South Carolina, and author of a website on the Great Vowel Shift of around the year 1400, speculated that the Germanic roots of some of these words may reinforce the sense that the blunt "u" is a cruder sound.

The blunt "u" isn't confined to monosyllables, though. It's there in a number of Latin-derived polysyllables: repulsion, revulsion, repugnant, pugnacious.

And it even shows up in "pulchritude," which has to be on the list of Top 10 Words in English That Do Not Mean What They Sound as if They Would Mean.