Anu Garg, the wordsmith of the "A Word A Day" e-mail that many of us word-lovers receive, did a series a few weeks ago on words signifying old professions. "Ostiary" was one – essentially a doorkeeper, generally the keeper of a church door. But imagine in a real estate ad: "Luxury building with 24-hour ostiary." Makes you want to run to check it out, doesn't it?

I was struck, though, by a couple of these occupational terms and the way they live on in surnames. And often such names don't mean quite what one would expect.

Bowyer and napier were two Mr. Garg mentioned. A bowyer is – was? – one who makes bows for archery. One who makes bows for stringed instruments is a bowmaker (duh), or a little more elegantly, an archetier - a term borrowed from French.

Today Bowyer is an uncommon name derived from a line of work that in its day must have been fairly common. One can imagine, oh, sometime in the Robin Hood era, the firm of  Bowyer & Fletcher, "Your full-service archery supplier," set up in a shop facing the village green.

"Napier" is a variation on naperer, "the person having charge of the royal table linen," according to the OED. That would seem to be a fairly specialized profession, but as a surname today, "Napier" is common enough that my online references list various famous Napiers (the inventor of the logarithm, inter al.) without defining "napier" as a common noun at all.

This might be an example of what I think of as the Smith paradox – Smith is so common as a name not because smiths were so numerous but because they were few enough that the occupation made a distinctive identifier – every village would have a smith, but probably only one.

But not all occupational names are quite what they seem. Take "Farmer," for instance. A no-brainer, truly: one who farms, Old MacDonald and his confreres. Well, maybe not. This is from ancestry.com about "Farmer" as a surname:

The term denoted in the first instance a tax farmer, one who undertook the collection of taxes, revenues, and imposts, paying a fixed (Latin firmus) sum for the proceeds, and only secondarily someone who rented land for the purpose of cultivation; it was not applied to an owner of cultivated land before the 17th century.

Similarly, my own pedestrian-sounding surname derives not from my forebears’ mode of transport but their occupation – walking cloth had to do with working a certain kind of fine clay ("fuller's earth") into it for smoothness – Walker being equivalent to the more English name “Fuller.”

"Calender" is a more unusual surname but like these others, it derives from an occupation – just not the one you might think. I wondered whether it might refer to an early incarnation of the appointments secretary ("Have thy girl call my girl, and they can set something up"), but no. (The "er" rather than "ar" ending should have been a tipoff.)

It turns out that a calender is "a machine that smoothes or glazes paper or cloth by pressing it between plates or passing it through rollers." This calender is related to our word "cylinder." The person who does this work is called a calenderer, or in times past, a calender.

While we're in the C's, there are another couple of occupational names that live on as surnames. A chandler was originally a maker or seller of candles but eventually the term was applied to those who sold retail supplies generally – particularly for sailing ships. Connoisseurs of the TV show "Friends" may be vaguely aware of this connection, especially if they remember Joey's remark about his friend Chandler Bing's moniker, "It's not even a name. It kinda sounds like 'chandelier,' but it's not."

A candler, on the other hand, is one who tests eggs by holding them up to a candle, or later, electric light. The OED's first citation isn't until 1906, by which time most people had settled on a surname. Accordingly, Candler as a surname is rare.

Apprentices used to hold candles to light their masters' work. Someone who couldn't hold a candle to someone else was of very lowly status indeed.

What do we make of all these fine old nouns, living on as surnames when their original function has disappeared? It seems like what they call in architectural circles "adaptive reuse," as when the old school becomes condos, or the train station or the power station becomes an art museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well. Does that make it perfectly clear?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However dazzlingly original people try to be with language, much of the time they fall back on old standbys, set phrases that are not so much clichés as expressions of the universals of the human experience: hello, goodbye, please, thank you, I love you, I’m so sorry to hear.

And thus most chefs, I imagine, don’t mind if their cuisine is pronounced "delicious" by those who have just enjoyed it. Many of those in other artistic fields – painting, music, landscape design – are pleased to hear their fans call their work "beautiful."

For those of us who toil in the world of news and public affairs, the word we most want to hear, day in and day out, is "interesting."

Interesting? It’s not exactly on par with the philosopher's ideal of the good, the true, and the beautiful, is it?

A reader has reminded me of this particular deficit in the language: "The word that I use so much and find so boring and can’t seem to find better choices [for] is 'interesting," she writes. "I could use help with this."

Hey, you and me both, sister!

Journalists are people who live in constant fear that readers/listeners/viewers/visitors are always on the verge of turning the page, changing the channel, clicking away to something else. And as a group, journalists are always reminding one another of the many options "news consumers" have for other things to do.

To be "interesting" – to hold the reader's attention to the end – is about as good as it gets in this world.

When I was first learning the word "interesting" as a very small child, I saw it seemed to be associated with grownups furrowing their brows and fiddling with their glasses to get a better look at something.

"Interesting" is sometimes a bit of diplomatic lingo to cover an unsuccessful experiment, notably in the kitchen. "This sauce, dear, is really quite interesting." Note that this comment is rarely followed by, "May I have a second helping?"

"May you live in interesting times" is supposed to be a Chinese curse, but that turns out to be folklore, perpetuated by Robert Kennedy, who used the line in a speech in South Africa in 1966.

The etymological roots of interesting and of interest, whence it comes, are far from clear. "There is much that is obscure in the history of this word," says the Oxford English Dictionary of interest.

As a Latin word, interest is a verb that means "[it] is of importance, makes a difference" – words music to a journalist's ears, truly. Early examples of "interest" were financial and legal. Interest in the sense of curiosity goes back to 1771: "That sparked my interest," that is, my attention.

The financial/legal and the intellectual senses of interested have gotten a little muddled at times. I remember reading a biography of a 19th-century financier referred to as being "interested" in a particular company. What was meant, I realized after a moment of confusion, was that he owned a share of the firm. It had captured not only his attention but a share of his wallet.

The knock on interesting is that it's a lazy word. It's often used to signal, "My wheels are turning, but I don't yet really know what to think."

What synonyms we could press into service? There's engaging. But engaging doesn't keep its distance quite the way interesting does. If I find a movie "engaging," I'm not thinking about it; I'm caught up in it. That's why engaging is an appealing concept, but also why it's not an ideal synonym for interesting.

Interesting is a "think"; engaging is a "feel." And engaging doesn't do diplomatic service the way interesting sometimes does, as in the "interesting sauce."

Roget's Thesaurus parks interesting right after engaging in a list of terms connected with "love," in the broadest sense – a very broad sense. Other possibilities gathered nearby: enchanting, captivating, fascinating, bewitching. All of these seem completely over the top for what I'm looking for: a synonym for interesting that has more energy but is still suitable in an everyday context.

Looking at Roget's list, I can't help thinking that interesting is the geeky friend that engaging has brought along to the party, where it doesn't quite fit in.

Back in the days when it was easier for audiences to think of a guy in a Wehrmacht uniform as a comic figure, Arte Johnson used to do a shtick as a German soldier on the old "Laugh-In" television show. He managed to make a national catch phrase out of his cryptic utterance, "ver-r-r-r-ry interesting." Often followed with an abrupt addendum, delivered in a similar comic accent - "but shtupit!" – it was his comment on whatever silliness his fellow troupers had just presented.

It provided some (much-needed) breathing room in the fast-paced show. And it maybe was about as "interesting" as interesting ever gets.

There are many words that people often mispronounce when they say them aloud, because they know them only from reading.

Cache (pronounced "cash") and cachet (rhymes with "sashay") fall into this category.

Radio reports sometimes mention  "weapons caches"  – pronounced "ca-SHAYS." Oops!

Conversely, I've seen in print comments to the effect that this or that business school, for instance, has "great cache" or "caché." Cache and cachet seem to pop up in each other's place like twins continually mistaken for each other in a Shakespearean comedy. And is it twins or maybe even triplets – what about that "caché"?

As I write this, Microsoft Word keeps trying to save me the embarrassment of the (normally incorrect) acute accent mark by slicing it off. But some people are not so well supported by their technology, it appears. And that French-looking acute does seem to have a certain, well, cachet. What can I say?

Just to be clear: Cache is a hiding place for food, ammunition, or similar supplies, or the supplies themselves. It has often been spelled the way it's been pronounced. Cache is associated particularly with explorers of the American West – Lewis and Clark, for instance – and the Arctic.

"As this was to be a point in our homeward journey, I made a cache (a term used in all this country for what is hidden in the ground) of a barrel of pork," John C. Fremont wrote in his 1842 account of exploring the Rocky Mountains. This gets to the idea of a cache as something you stash along the way, knowing you'll be coming back that way later.

A cachet, on the other hand, was originally a seal – a king's personal seal, as distinct from an official seal. Then the meaning stretched to cover any indication of approval conveying great prestige (e.g., "Istvan's new place has won the cachet of the Best of Boston award for the Best New Afghan-Hungarian Deli").

From there cachet has come to refer to the prestige itself. Merriam Webster cites Truman Capote on this point: "Being rich doesn't have the cachet it used to."

Cachet has its very dark side, though. A letter of cachet (lettre de cachet, in French) was an order by the French king, under his private seal (going back to that original meaning of cachet) containing an order, often for someone's imprisonment or death.

A happier specialized use of cachet is a philatelic one – the little advertising message or other motto on a postmark or on a postage meter impression, "Season's Greetings" or "Support Your Local Merchants" or whatever. (Isn't it a kick to know just the right term for something like that?)

If cache and cachet are so often confused, is there perhaps a reason for that? After all, if there seems to be a family resemblance, it may be that the words are related. Indeed yes. Both derive from the French word cacher, to hide. (French children playing cache-cache are playing "hide and seek" – or "hide and go seek," in the wordier version I learned as a kid.)

But cache and cachet, like twins separated at birth, have gone off on different paths. Cache started out as a hiding place for supplies, then became a hidden supply of something, and more recently has become a not-so-hidden supply. Cachet, on the other hand, started as the personal seal, the less public seal, the seal that was more or less hidden.

But the part of cachet that developed, that had legs, so to speak, was not its "hidden" quality but its connection with high-level approval.

Omnibus comes to mind as another example of widely divergent meanings springing from a single root. Omnibus is Latin and means "for all." In the 19th century it was applied to public conveyances - those providing "carriage for all." The word was universally shortened to "bus" and then applied to all manner of carts and conveyances.

But legislators often speak of "omnibus bills" – those with something for everyone, aka "Christmas tree bills." There the emphasis is on the "everyone" rather than the transport, and "omnibus" is not abbreviated.

Fortunately bus and omnibus cause no particular pronunciation problems. Confusions over cache/cachet and the like, on the other hand, are often the mark of the autodidact, the one who learns from his or her own reading but then may not get a chance to discuss.

My own high-water mark as an autodidact came some years ago as I was getting ready to do a television interview in which I was to discuss the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . As a production assistant was going through the ticklish business of running microphone wires through my sleeve, it suddenly dawned on me that for all the time I spent reading Csikszentmihalyi's book, I really wasn't sure how to pronounce his name.

Fortunately, a slightly panicked call to his publisher’s publicists settled the confusion.

Thank goodness for publicity departments.

My friends the bees seem to be in trouble.

A radio report the other day said a mysterious illness is affecting bees in great numbers across much of the United States. It's something called "colony collapse disorder." Beekeepers show up at a site where they are to release their charges to pollinate an orchard or a field, open the hives, and find almost no bees inside.

This mass demise of bees hints at larger environmental dangers: Are pesticides and other petrochemicals working their way mysteriously back to the hive? It evokes thoughts of the kind of civilizational collapse through ecological disaster that Jared Diamond has written about in his book "Collapse."

And it suggests the degree to which human beings identify with bees. "Bee" has been used to mean "busy worker" since at least 1535. And in our own day, many people seem quite willing to refer to themselves as "worker bees" within an organization.

For a nation where "rugged individualism" is an ostensible ideal, the worker bee may not be an obvious role model: long hours, no prospects for upward mobility, no love life. But to refer to the rank and file as worker bees who get things done is to acknowledge, however obliquely, the presence of management "drones" who are, well, in a meeting.

Hmm. That may be a bit subtle. But it's out there. An accounting firm, for instance, has offered advice on how to close the gap between executive and nonexecutive compensation in an online article under the headline "Charming the Worker Bees."

Sometimes within an organization, the "worker bees" are the generalists as contrasted with the specialists, e.g., those within the IT department. Thus another online management publication posted a piece called "Worker Bees: An IT Resource in Plain Sight."

Its message was that companies should be willing to let the technically inclined staff in their operating units figure out new software applications and other tech stuff the IT people are too overloaded (or maybe just too geeky) to deal with.

An observation, while we're in the IT neighborhood: The metaphor behind the World Wide Web suggests a spider. But we could have captured some of the essential features of the Internet with a metaphor based on bees instead: the Holistic Horizontal Honeycomb. The relentless expansion, the built-in redundancies, and the capacity to work around obstacles as needed are as characteristic of honeybees as of the Web.

An apian metaphor is implicit in "buzz marketing," which attempts to generate word-of-mouth advertising for products and services. (Why does that sound like buying friendship, or at least fishing for compliments?) The labors of the worker bees may seem to be mindless, but any hive knows the power of working together – knows in a bee-brained kind of way, that is.

James Surowiecki's 2004 book, "The Wisdom of Crowds" maintained that "the many are smarter than the few." Now that's something bees have understood from the get-go. Surowiecki argued that when a large number of ordinary people make some kind of estimate (of weight, price, etc.) and all the estimates are averaged, the result is likely to be a more accurate estimate than one expert, or even more than one expert, could provide. The book gave a different spin on "crowd psychology" as usually understood.

The blogosphere is in some ways a good example of bee behavior. People blog as a form of individual self-expression, of course. But all those individual voices add up to a collective buzz that can be a useful guide to public opinion – or the state of public knowledge.

The blogosphere certainly helped disseminate the wisdom of crowds in Boston during our "terror scare" of a few weeks ago. Bloggers, though, figured out fairly quickly that the whole thing was just a marketing gimmick, under way in other cities as well as Boston.

Confidential to Mayor Menino and your colleagues in other cities: Your homeland security strategy needs to include monitoring the blogosphere. Harness the energy of the worker bees.

Have you noticed that we're all entrepreneurs now?

This observation crystallized for me not long ago as I was buying software for my new computer.

As the softwaremakers slice and dice the market and offer multiple versions of the same program, would-be purchasers have to decide whether they can get away with the stripped-down "home" edition. The answer, for anyone already out of middle school, is generally not. Signs that we have become the "Free Agent Nation" that Daniel H. Pink suggested in his 2001 book can be seen at a computer store near you.

A notch up from "home" (sounds warmer than "amateur," doesn't it?) there is often a "professional" version. "Professional" tends to suggest the freelance road warrior with a laptop in a messenger bag camped out at Starbucks.

Then there's "small business," which in today's economic landscape seems to cover everything from a home-based catering operation to a company about to go public.

And one level from "small business" in this hierarchy is often "enterprise." And what an artful term that is. For the simple matter of selling software (or other services) enterprise suggests large numbers of users, possibly multiple locations, probably some sort of tech support in house. It's a signal of scale, in short.

But isn't it more appealing term than "big business" or even "corporate"? And it certainly sounds more energetic than "organization."

Small business is capitalism with a human face. When Napoleon dismissed the British as a "nation of shopkeepers," everyone understood that wasn't meant as a compliment. But that's about the extent of rude remarks about small business. Small business gets played by Jimmy Stewart in the movies. Big business gets played by Lionel Barrymore.

No wonder the softwaremakers are glad to be able to call their offerings for big-business clients "enterprise-level" products and services. And enterprise, I suspect, is trendy right now because of associations with "entrepreneur."

Entrepreneur, Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg noted in a piece on National Public Radio a few years ago, is a term that came back into vogue during the Reagan years, when capitalism was being redeemed as an intellectually respectable idea.

But capitalist, Nunberg added, didn't make the same kind of comeback. It retained some of its robber-baron connotations. And so people turned to entrepreneur – and applied it ex post facto to people like Thomas Edison.

President Bush is said to have once told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'" That isn't to say, I hasten to add, that he ever said it. There's a fair bit of evidence that he did not – not that that has stopped an outfit called Redmolotov.com from selling T-shirts with this very statement attributed to the 43rd president of the United States. How entrepreneurial.

Back to the software shelf: You don't see "small enterprise" as an option. But as Nunberg observed on NPR, there's been a "great leveling of the language of capitalism" – and even self-employed pieceworkers are being cast as "entrepreneurs" – even though they may be in that role involuntarily.

Entrepreneur is a word borrowed from French that means "one who undertakes something." Or "an undertaker," we might say, but usually don't. The thing undertaken is the enterprise – almost exactly the same word as in French. An "enterprise" can be almost any kind of new activity, but the word has more than a whiff of adventure about it, a tang of salt air on a sea breeze, and a sense of a "quest."

"Enterprise zone" is a hopeful-sounding term that has caught on in a number of places to refer to areas that need some sort of redevelopment – to the point where the government is willing to give tax breaks to those who locate there.

An "enterprise story" is something journalists love to pursue – the story that comes not from official briefings or the usual tipsters but a reporter's own observation and original thought. Enterprise stories are the opposite of pack journalism.

Entrepreneur and its related words have exact counterparts in German as well as English. And impresario, another term long since borrowed into English, is the Italian version of this same concept. In English an "impresario" is one who organizes public entertainments. It always sounds operatic to me, but it's been applied to rock concert king Bill Graham as well as Sol Hurok. In the 19th century, entrepreneur was often used for this function.

In fact, all these terms seem to have bounced around in meaning over the years. Those sent to hold crown lands in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance, were called "undertakers."

Under the Stuart kings in the 17th century, the term undertakers was applied to those who "undertook to influence the action of Parliament, esp. with regard to the voting of supplies," as the Oxford English Dictionary decorously puts it. Lobbyists, we would call them today.

Undertaker was applied to people in the publishing world – today's "editorial assistants" or maybe "production editors" or even "publishers." Sometimes a baptismal sponsor was known as "an undertaker," which could have been confusing at the church.

But by the end of the 17th century, undertaker was being used to refer to those who undertook to bury the dead. Use of the term in connection with that particular enterprise made it less likely to be used elsewhere.

No wonder when we talk about enterprising men and women today, we call them "entrepreneurs."

The 110th Congress of the United States has just been sworn in.

In anticipation of the event, I did a little poking around to find out what's involved in the ceremony. The presidential oath of office is spelled out in the Constitution, but an oath for members of Congress is indicated only in general terms. Here is the current version:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

The oath of office confirms that the individual members are loyal, in other words – "faithful in allegiance to the sovereign or constituted government," as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it in one of its definitions, the one it calls "the most prominent in use."

Loyalty has been much on my mind in recent months because it's been much in my ear. I've been hearing a lot about it from two different directions. One is the domestic political front. President Bush is famous for valuing personal loyalty. So is incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But on the war news front, we hear a lot about loyalty in other contexts. We keep hearing about "militias loyal to" this or that leader, typically not a leader of a state but someone with enough power to make the official government nervous, or worse.

The "militias loyal to" construction is one of those awkward locutions news organizations settle on as shorthand to refer to an entity or a situation that is otherwise hard to explain in three words or less.

That such partisans are armed is so self-evident that it can't be controversial to say so, and this lets editors on tight deadline avoid the nettlesome nuances of "terrorist," "guerrilla," "freedom fighter," etc. Loyalty being generally a virtue, to describe these people as "loyal to" anyone in particular arguably makes many of them sound better than they deserve.

I've just done a quick check and readily found several countries where "militias loyal to" someone other than the head of a constitutional government are major players.

From The Guardian, on Iraq:

"A Pentagon report on Monday said that the Mahdi Army, the armed militia loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had eclipsed al-Qaida as the most dangerous agent of sectarian violence."

From Reuters, on Somalia, where the Islamists who had imposed sharia across much of the country abandoned the capital last week:

Within hours of the Islamists' departure, militiamen loyal to warlords ousted in June reappeared at checkpoints in the city where they used to rob, rape and murder civilians.

Recent media reports have also been mentioning a possible civil war in the Palestinian territories. And so I was concerned to see the word "loyal" pop up, albeit without "militia," in a recent story on factional violence in the West Bank: "Security members loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas attacked Hamas members...."

Loyal came to English from Latin via Old and Medieval French, and is related to "legal." It has an obsolete meaning of "legitimate" – in "King Lear," Shakespeare makes reference to a "loyall and naturall boy."

But however rooted in law the word is etymologically, its meaning is connected with affection, with personal relationships and attachments. "Faithful to plighted troth" is part of Oxford's definition of "loyal." And this very serious-sounding phrase refers to marriage and other serious commitments. (I recall once upon a time reading an interview with a state legislator who remarked that her swearing-in ceremony actually called on her to say "I do.")

The war-zone reports show the dark side of "loyal," when partisan commitments may be the best anyone can make.

One might say that members of the 110th Congress are fortunate to have a constitutional system to be loyal to. In a perhaps brief moment of fresh beginnings and maybe just a whiff of goodwill in Washington, it's something not to be taken for granted.

Overheard recently in the halls of one of metro Boston's many fine institutions of higher learning, doctoral candidate to dean: "I've heard from NYU, and they told me I'm on the long shortlist."
A while later, on the radio: mention of a Boston Globe report that Harvard University, in its quest for a new president, had managed to whittle down its candidates to a shortlist of fewer than 30.

I've been intrigued by the concept of a shortlist, or short list, as Americans outside academia are wont to write it, at least since the closing days of Jimmy Carter's single term in the White House. I remember reading an interview with one of the president's senior aides in which he expressed regret that his team never managed to communicate to the American people a "short list" of a few goals they were trying to accomplish.

A relentless listmaker myself, I utterly identified with the man's plight, however much smaller my own sphere is than the Oval Office. (I know, by the way, that this blog has been "listing" a lot in recent weeks. New Year's resolution: no more for at least six months.)

In the years since reading the Carter piece, I've been interested to see how "short list" has been codified, and "closed up," as we editors say, into a single word. Closing up often signals acceptance of a new concept, as when Web site became, at least by Monitor style rules, website, for instance.

Other times, though, a closed-up form has a different meaning from a two-word form. Compare "deadline" and "dead line." (Hey, can someone call the phone techs? I can't get dial tone!) "Shortlist" is largely a British usage. A Google News search found only two examples in American English in the top 50 or so hits.

One of them, as it happens, was a report in the Daily Californian that Robert Dynes, president of the University of California, is in the running for the top spot at Harvard. "Shortlists" come up often in discussions of literary awards. One reads of this or that book "shortlisted" for a prize such as the Man Booker. In any case, the shortlisting quickly becomes a credential to be included in all an author's publicity material thereafter, a kind of book world equivalent to Hollywood references to "the Oscar-nominated Charlie Heartthrob" or whomever.

Shortlists abound in the sports world, too, where teams and coaches combine and recombine continually into new arrangements like the glass bits in a kaleidoscope. Each time a coach quits or is fired, the resulting vacancy leads to a list of candidates for a successor. Some of the ostensible shortlists my Google News search turned up were actually pretty long.

The Bangkok Post recently reported on a "shortlist" of 200 candidates for the assembly to draft a new national charter for Thailand. Someone is unclear on the concept, meseems.

At least in the academy, they speak straightforwardly of a "long shortlist," as in the exchange I overheard on campus. But I've run across a new wrinkle at Oxford University:

An accepted practice for academic appointments is to produce an initial long shortlist based on assessment of a number of key criteria, and then to seek references and/or examples of published or unpublished research for these applicants.

An initial long shortlist? Is that a further refinement? Is the initial long shortlist followed by the intermediate long shortlist and then the final long shortlist? Or do we go from the initial shortlist to a medium shortlist – or a midlist? No, that's a publishing term.

Do we proceed along the x axis of temporality (initial/intermediate/final) or the y axis of spatiality (long/medium/short)? Or is the point of a list not to bring time and space together? To get things done, in other words?

I sense I'm not alone in thinking such search processes sound awfully cumbersome. A few years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education ran – pseudonymously – a multipart series giving an inside view of academic search from the hiring side of the table:

One committee member ... insisted that it was impossible to properly evaluate people on the basis of cover letters and letters of recommendation alone. That led us to create an unmanageably large pool of applicants to ask for further information, with the unfortunate result that we probably misled candidates into thinking that they had a more serious chance for our job than they actually did.

For its target audience, it was a real cliff-hanger, I'm sure. (A side note: I suspect that the complicated selection processes of higher education, including those for student admissions, give young people just starting out a misimpression of how people get jobs in the outside world.)

To get back to the discussion of achieving goals in the White House – the essence of the short list the Carter aide longed for was "short." The essence of the academic shortlist is "list." It is used in places where comprehensiveness and inclusiveness may trump decisiveness.

Literary prizes, after all, are given to get more people buying and reading books. The more authors who can claim the "shortlist" credential, the better, I suppose, from their point of view. Similarly, the Thais want to get their new charter right.

This cover-all-bases instinct leads to shortlists that are downright long.

It's that time of year when I wonder how we ever got along without online wish lists. They've made holiday gift shopping so much easier than in the old days, when we had to trudge three miles through the snow to get to Bloomingdale's.

But there's another wish list I tend to as well. I carry it around in my head and keep adding to it all year long. It's a list of concepts for which I wish we had better words.

Some of them are as basic as "a lot." As in, a lot of stuff. We use "a lot" to mean "much" but it also really means "some." It's rather the way "a few" and "several" can refer to the same actual number of  something, depending on whether it's something you want more of or less of. How do we say "beaucoup" in English?

What I'm getting at is that in formal English, where "a lot" is really too casual, we so often go to circumlocutions like "considerable" ("considerable public discussion about the pipeline") or "a great deal of."

We do have "much," but it works mostly in the negative: "There isn't much food left in the fridge." In the affirmative, "much" tends to sound quaint and/or stuffy, or mock-formal: "Much merriment ensued."

The much/a lot problem comes up mostly with what we words nerds call "mass nouns," as distinct from "count nouns." To explain with examples: Coin is a count noun and money is a mass noun. For count nouns there's "many," which doesn't seem quite so quaint: "We have many possibilities to consider." (To be fair, though, many people – OK, lots of people – would say "lots of possibilities." See, even I did it – and I do it a lot.)

So maybe we should just accept "a lot" as perfectly correct for all occasions. But with "much" you know where you stand. "A lot" has a certain ambiguity of meaning.

I have a lot of books around my apartment; an auctioneer has a lot of books in his warehouse, too. They're two different kinds of lot. My lot is about muchness, maybe overmuchness. To an auctioneer, a "lot" is all in a day's work, even if he has far more actual books than I do.

Then there's "lot" in the real estate sense – lot with improvements, as your house is known at the county courthouse or town hall. "A lot is discussed at school board" was a local newspaper headline I ran across the other day. I thought maybe a controversial construction site had finally been broached for public discussion somewhere in the heartland. But no, the headline writer was simply trying to convey that the board had a long agenda.

Other words on my wish list: a better word for "important," "major," "significant" and all those other tired locutions we journalists so often reach for: "A significant new development in the ongoing efforts to...zzzz."

What we're trying to say is, "This is a big deal."  But what do we mean by "deal"? Is this a  card game?

In a sense, yes. The underlying concept of is dividing and distributing, as one deals out cards at the beginning of a game. The word is related to "dole." The various other senses of "deal" - the bargaining, the transacting, the interacting, all grow out of this concept. Even "new deal" - a phrase linked inextricably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt but actually used a century before him in connection with Andrew Jackson. Thank you, Oxford English Dictionary.

I'm suddenly remembering back to the days of chattering teletypes in the wire room. The code for a major (that word again!) news alert on the Reuters ticker was the simple word "snap" in all caps.

When I checked with agency headquarters, word came from editor Paul Homes that although "snap" hasn't been an official designation since the 1980s, it's still around.

The term "snap" remains very much alive and kicking internally in the Reuters news division. It is the term most commonly used by journalists – even these days – for an "alert". "Should we snap it?" is often heard in Reuters newsrooms.

This exchange has left me feeling I've rediscovered an old friend. Bully for Reuters for coming up with this in the first place, and for the agency culture for keeping it alive.

O readers! Are there concepts that you'd like to see expressed in language that has, well, more  snap? Drop me a line and let me know.

When did yes! get its "s" back?

What do you mean, "get it back"? you may ask. It never lost it, not in proper English anyway.

Indeed not. But I'm not thinking of the standard yes of "yes and no," but of that emphatic yes! that has become something of a micro-catch phrase in American English over the past 20 years or so.

It's a yes! that used to be yeah! - with a bang, as the exclamation point used to be known in print shops.

When the Red Sox finally broke "the curse" by sweeping the 2004 World Series, the one-word lead headline in The Boston Globe was "YES!!!"

The same affirmation was certainly a scene-stealer in 1989, the year of the movie "When Harry Met Sally." This is the flick with the deli scene in which Estelle Reiner, after overhearing a bravura performance from Meg Ryan at an adjacent table, memorably tells the waitress, "I'll have whatever she's having."

And at a perhaps more down-to-earth level, "Yes!" is the refrain of "Life's Little Victories," an occasional feature in Keith Knight's cartoon strip, "The K Chronicles" in salon.com.

Researching all these has meant negotiating some nuances among them. The ordinary yeah, for one thing, has an odd dual life.

In Neil Simon's comedy, "The Odd Couple," Felix establishes the motherhood credentials of the wife who has just given him the boot by explaining how polite their children are. "They speak beautifully – never 'yeah,' always 'yes.'" For Felix, that final sibilant (the technical term for the "s" sound) is the mark of good manners.

But yeah is ubiquitous in ordinary conversation, even on the lips of well educated people, although it appears far less frequently in print. There's also the yea (rhymes with "hooray") of a cheer – "Yea, team!" This appears in published form so seldom that most people probably think it's written yay, as it often is in instant messages and other informal writing.

Trying to establish a timeline for use of phrases like "Our team, yeah!" I ran across a number of instances of yeah online where the long-a yea was probably meant.

The real research find, though, came in the Oxford English Dictionary. It turns out that while yes! is very much a contemporary utterance, it reflects a usage that goes back centuries.

Its background is a little murky, but yes came later than yea, and is, the OED reports, "confined to English." On the other hand, yea has counterparts in other Teutonic languages.

The OED also says that yes was "formerly usually more emphatic than 'yea' or 'ay.'" Which is to say that "yes," half a millennium ago or so, would have had an effect quite like what the Globe was striving for to celebrate Boston's moment of baseball glory.

After 1600 or so yes replaced yea and ay as "the ordinary affirmative particle," as the OED puts it. But there is another principle of usage at play here: yes as the answer to a question phrased in the negative: "Aren't you coming with us?" "Yes, I am."

(In the King James Bible, "yes" appears four times – in response to questions or statements phrased in the negative. The 1881 revisers missed the nuance and turned them all into archaic-sounding "yeas.")

These two special uses run in the same direction: After all, when you're giving a positive response to something phrased in the negative, you're likely to be emphatic: "Yes, I certainly do know what I'm doing and I'll thank you to get out of my way."

In language as in fashion, things come in cycles. The triumphal "yes!" of the athlete (think Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) isn't just saying "yes, we did it." Rather, it's "They said it wasn't possible. But despite the obstacles we did it. Yes!!"

"What's with agnostic?" a reader writes.

"Could you illuminate this subject (if not eradicate it, before it takes over like a fungus)?"

I'm happy to. Who wants to be taken over by a fungus?

Agnostic was coined by T. H. Huxley in 1870 to describe "one who professes that the existence of a First Cause and the essential nature of things are not and cannot be known." For his neologism he drew on a Greek word meaning "unknown." So agnostic has been traditionally used to refer to the knowledge – or not – of God.

Now it's being applied to those who don't know, and hence don't have an opinion on, other things. It's a highbrow way of saying "I don't have a dog in that fight."

Does this new meaning serve a need – or will it ruin the word for its original purpose?

Dealing with a word in transition is like being on one of those "articulated" subway cars we have on our wonderful MBTA system here in Boston. They have a bend in the middle that makes it easier to get around corners. But if you're standing in just the right – or maybe just the wrong – place, you need to be sure you're hanging on firmly when the car goes around the bend. Your footing will be unsteady for a few moments.

Once the corner has been turned, though, the unsteadiness may seem worth it if you have a useful new term. The case for the "new agnosticism" may be best made in situations that can be represented schematically like this: "I don't know, and I don't need to know, what goes on with X before I see it. But here's what I need X to do or be when I do see it."

Thus, on a Friday afternoon, a boss may say frankly to a troublesome employee: "You've been giving off such bad vibes around here that the geraniums in the break room are dying. You really need to get yourself straightened out over the weekend. Take a walk in the woods, go bowling with your family, talk with your spiritual counselor: I'm agnostic on how you do it, but you've got to have a better attitude when you come in Monday morning. "

The Greek derivation may give agnostic a certain dignity, may signal a willingness to suspend judgment. But unless the "don't know" clearly has "don't need to know and maybe can't know" folded into it, it's hard to make the case for this use of agnostic. (Of course, if someone really just doesn't know, there's the Latin-derived adjective ignorant. But who wants to claim that label?)

The "new agnosticism" shows up in the technical realm all the time, as in the recent announcement of a "location appliance" that claims to be "infrastructure-agnostic." It's a technology that helps business keep track of their assets – their mobile employees' cellphones, laptops, and other devices (and by extension, keep track of the employees themselves).

The "appliance" is agnostic in the sense that it doesn't know and doesn't need to know what kind of network infrastructure the user has – but can play with anyone.

A recent Business Week article on the future of The New York Times refers to its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as a "platform-agnostic multimedia man" – ready to see Times content online as well as in print.

It sounds like jargon, because it is jargon. And it's a comedown for a word used in discussions of God to be applied to mere gizmos.

Beyond that, agnostic often seems to have a subtext of "I don't care," which has about it more than a whiff of indifference, of disengagement. "I don't care whether we see the movie Friday or Saturday night," you may tell your significant other. "Oh, I thought you wanted to see it," may be the response.

What the geeks, though, are generally describing when they say "agnostic" is neutrality. Neutrality itself isn't a concept that makes anyone's heart beat faster. After all, in "Casablanca," the man for whom Ingrid Bergman turns Humphrey Bogart down is a wartime resistance leader, not a Swiss banker.

But at least "neutral" lacks the tuned-out "whatever" air that clings to this newer use of agnostic. The technical world has another useful adjective to cover this "open to all" attitude: universal.

"Universal power supply," for instance, is the term for the little box that massages the current coming out of the wall in a strange hotel room and feeds it into your laptop computer without frying it.

But even if you didn't know that, doesn't "universal power supply" sound like something you'd really like to have – much more than an infrastructure-agnostic location appliance?

In these last few days before the midterm elections in the United States, I find I've been thinking about Monsieur Jourdain.

That would be Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, the hero of "The Bourgeois Gentleman."

The play is a comedy about a parvenu – exactly the right word, and how often do we get to use it? – who tries to make his way into the aristocracy with the help of some new threads and a gaggle of what we would today call "personal coaches."

One of them is a "philosophy master" who tries to explain to him the distinction between poetry and prose. Here's Monsieur Jourdain's big discovery: "By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it."

By 17th-century standards, that counts as a knock-'em-dead punch line. But there's a serious lesson here, too. Sometimes it isn't until we learn about something new – poetry, in the case of M. Jourdain – that we are able to understand fully its more familiar counterpart.

For well over 200 years, Americans have had a "first past the post" system for their elections, mostly without knowing anything about it. This is the system whereby the one with the most votes wins. It's how we decide elections in the US.

We take this so much for granted that we barely have a name for it. It makes me think of those indigenous tribes whose name for themselves in their own language means something like "the people" or "regular folks."

I probably first read the phrase "first past the post" (FPTP) many moons ago in The Economist, which is based in London, though it seems to pride itself on having most of its circulation outside Britain.

FPTP, the term, is used mostly outside the United States. Of 154 references to "first past the post" on Google News when I checked just now, only three were from American publications.

I was surprised at how many of these hits referred to actual horse races rather than elections, but perhaps I shouldn't have been. FPTP is an idiom borrowed from horse racing. This gives it a certain energizing excitement lacking in its blander equivalent in American poli sci jargon, "plurality voting."

Simplicity is part of the appeal of plurality voting. Everybody "gets it." The downside is that it is possible to win without a majority of votes.

And when used with a set of multiple districts as in the US House, for instance, FPTP can magnify a string of small victories. If those small victories are spread around in enough districts, they can give one party a lopsided legislative majority.

A single House race decided by 435 votes would be considered a squeaker. But with FPTP it is theoretically possible for one party of capture all 435 House districts by a plurality of a single vote in each one - a 435-vote margin that would color the entire country red or blue.

And some would say that magnification is not a bad thing, and tends to give a country clearer direction, than would happen with a more "balanced" legislature. FPTP tends to push a polity toward a two-party system; third parties (and fourth and fifth parties as well) tend to disappear in such situations, unless they are concentrated geographically and can win pluralities in at least some local jurisdictions.

Other cognoscenti would argue for some form of proportional representation – a system that ensures, for instance, that if a given party had roughly 20 percent support among the electorate, it would have about 20 percent of the seats in the legislature. (Imagine the US House after the 1992 with 82 members of the Reform Party, as a reflection of Ross Perot's relative success as a third-party candidate.)

"PR," as electoral wonks know it, is in wide use in Western Europe and in Israel, with enough local variations to make your head spin. Germans, for instance, get two votes, one for an individual and one for a party preference (which would help address the quandary of an American voter who thinks, "I like my congressman but think it's time for a change in Washington").

"Preferential voting," an Australian specialty, is another term to throw around. This system has a voter going down a list of candidates and ranking them in order of preference, and is supposed to ensure that most voters get at least their second choice as a winner. FPTP forces some voters to vote for the candidate they dislike least to defeat the one they dislike most.

Two of the countries most active in helping emerging democracies with their election procedures are Canada and Australia – both former British colonies, "middle powers" who often punch above their weight on the international scene. Canada has largely stuck with the FPTP it inherited, but Australia has been a huge experimenter over the years.

The secret ballot, for instance, was an Australian innovation introduced in the mid-19th century, several decades before it was picked up in the United States, where it became known, unsurprisingly, as the Australian ballot.

I'm not necessarily advocating a change in the US system, any more than if I would try to get Monsieur Jourdain to speak in verse. But learning some new electoral vocabulary may help Americans understand the prose of their own system.

Is "notorious" about to flip?

That was the question that went through my mind the other day as I looked over an article that referred to someone as being a "notoriously light eater."

Hmm, is this the right word? Notoriety means "the state of being known for some unfavorable act or quality," doesn't it? Unless we're talking about eating disorders - and in this case, trust me, we're not - I'm not sure that being a light eater is exactly an "unfavorable" situation.

On the other hand, the light eater in question was the host of a TV food show, so maybe this was meant semi-seriously: After all, who wants restaurant recommendations from someone who doesn't like to eat? So in a little bit of editorial diplomacy, I suggested we say that the man in question is "well known as a light eater" and leave it at that.

This little encounter did make me wonder whether the distinction between fame – being known for something good – and notoriety is being lost. Or in other words, has the "wrong" usage overtaken the "right" one to the point that the meaning has "flipped," and we can now simply say that "notorious" means "famous," period?

In our celebrity-obsessed pop culture, it may be that there truly is no such thing as bad publicity, and so the distinction is meaningless. For a careful writer or editor trying to connect with a mass audience, the language is full of ambiguous usages that need to be avoided or so carefully packaged with contextual clues so that the chance of misunderstanding is held to a minimum.

For instance, "table," as a verb, is a common term in legislative and similar official circles: One tables a motion, or a new report. It originally meant to present something for discussion, but in American usage, that "tabling" is a stalling technique; it often means to postpone indefinitely. Any publication trying to reach an international audience should try to avoid it.

Similarly, some style guides advise against using "biweekly" in favor of "every two weeks" (or twice a week instead of "semiweekly"). The new hire who hears from the human resources office that he's to be paid "biweekly" and thinks that means a check on both Wednesday and Friday afternoon is headed for trouble.

As for "notorious," a little quick Googling suggests that the two most salient appearances of the word on the pop-cultural horizon are as the title of a 1946 Alfred Hitchcock movie and as the name of a hip-hop superstar mysteriously murdered in Los Angeles in 1997, Notorious B.I.G.

The latter, in particular, this suggests that the idea that "notoriety" = "bad fame" is pretty well fixed, but I may be bringing a lot of middle-class hang-ups to the discussion. The late Notorious B.I.G. lives on in his music.

And as for the Hitchcock flick: It's about how government agents try to get Ingrid Bergman, who has taken to drink after her father's conviction for treason against the United States, to spy on his Nazi friends in South America. It's a classic favorite, and it may have left whole generations thinking that if Ingrid Bergman was “notorious,” it wasn't a bad thing to be, especially if Cary Grant was involved.

A quick look at "notoriety" on Onelook.com suggests that the "bad fame" sense is the accepted usage. And it has been that way since the 17th century. But the original meaning of "notorious" was not negative. It simply meant "well known."

Sometimes two forks of a river flow together again downstream. Sometimes a distinction in meaning, often somewhat arbitrary anyway, gets lost and nobody misses it.

We aren't there yet with "notorious." But we may get there.

"Why can't they just call it 'fundraising'?" I grumbled to a friend, many, many moons ago, after she had just taken a job in the "development office" of one of New England's many fine private colleges.

It was my first exposure to the usage and I hadn't yet registered how widespread it was – and is. But it smacks of unnecessary euphemism.

"Development" in this sense is a term you're likely to have heard if you find yourself anywhere downwind from an institution of higher learning, especially, but by no means only, a private one; any cultural or arts organization, such as a library or museum; or a charitable or nonprofit agency such as a healthcare facility.

It's not as if raising money for one's alma mater or any other valuable institution is a sordid activity that has to be hidden under some other name. The American tendency to organize into, and generously support, voluntary associations for all sorts of purposes has been observed and celebrated at least since Tocqueville.

Development, the noun, derives, obviously, from develop, the verb, which comes from French words meaning to unwrap, unroll, or unfold. "Develop" is etymologically a counterpart of the verb "envelop."

Both the verb and the noun are used in different ways in different fields, but with some underlying commonalities: an opening or manifesting of some sort, and some sense of stages or phases, generally gradual but occasionally fast-moving.

Thus we have the development of buds and blossoms on a tree; the development of photographic film, in which the image appears; real estate development ("Phase II opening this spring!"); and, in the world of journalism, late-breaking developments on the big story.

But when I turn to OneLook.com, which lets me look up a word in several online dictionaries simultaneously, and glance at the "quick definitions" for "development," I see that there are eight of them, and none refer to fundraising.

This is not a good sign.

Let us beware the disconnect that arises when the practitioners of an activity call it something else than the term by which it's generally known.

("And what does Sally's new boyfriend do?" Uncle Ralph asks with avuncular concern. "He's the new development officer at Springback Junior College," Mom replies, as Sally has coached her. To which Uncle Ralph, who's no fool, shoots back, "You mean he hits people up for money?")

It gets all the more complicated when you consider that the kind of institutions that call their fundraisers "development officers" generally do a lot of things that really should be described as "development," e.g., "developmental studies" designed to refresh the skills or fill in the knowledge gaps of those wanting to continue their education, perhaps later in life, or after a hard-knocks childhood.

Thus when I ran across mention of some borderline students as "development cases" in the context of admissions to megabucks private institutions, I thought it referred to those students on whom the college has compassion, seeing unrealized potential that only needs to be brought out.

But no.

The term refers to borderline students, all right, but those whom the institution sees as potential donors down the line. It's development in that other sense. And the practice has at least one reporter fairly cranked up - Daniel Golden, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has just published a book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."

As The Washington Post noted in its review of Golden's book,

That virtually all elite private colleges give preference to the sons and daughters of alumni will come as a surprise to no one. But preference also extends to wealthy applicants whose families have been identified as potential donors – "development cases" in the parlance of the trade.

Now that is a dubious development indeed.