Over at the Daily Beast, Michael Schaffer recently predicted that Dick Cheney's nickname, like the man himself, is on the way out. Not because of its associations with the Vice President's tenure, but because the slang use of the word has spread into casual usage, tainting the traditional name:

As dirty-word prohibitions loosened over the 20th century, more and more people began to hear the word and think of something other than, say, NBC executive Dick Ebersol. Slang dictionaries show a progression of other negative connotations for the word, which was used to connote an incompetent or a bully. Newly abusive conjunctions* also came into fashion, as the word became attached to -head, -brain, and -nose, the latter of which the OED helpfully informs us first cropped up in 1974, the year Tricky Dick and his own ski-slope nose left Washington for good.

Like most fashion changes, this one strikes people of different generations in different ways. Most anyone old enough to remember Dick Clark in his heyday had plenty of high school friends named Dick, and perhaps less exposure to the negative slang elaborations. But younger men, Schaffer says, are opting for Rick and Richard and Ricky instead of Dick.

Still, unlike some naming fads, this one need not affect the proper name itself, with all those Richard nicknames. (Though Richard is already in trouble, says Schaffer: The former name of kings now ranks 99th -- behind Kaden and Cooper! -- among boys' names.)

And Schaffer admits he's only guessing. With Dick Lugar and Dick Holbrooke still on the political scene, the name isn't going to vanish from the news. But Schaffer hopes the end is near:

Cheney . . . is all that we could want for an already anachronistic moniker's last turn in the spotlight: so bald, so taciturn, such a . . . well, you know. Goodbye, Mr. Vice President. You did your name proud.

*Schaffer seems to mean "compound words" here, not "conjunctions" in the part-of-speech sense.

AP file photo

So far, in my seasonal catalog browsing, I haven't found any shockers to rival the one my friend Louise recently spotted in a tasteful museum catalog, a nightgown of "dotted swill." Nor have I seen a color name any stranger than my all-time favorite, "perineal blue," one of the available shades for a department store sweater.

But I did find a brain teaser of a product name in the Woolrich catalog this fall: a sweater called the Addie Mock Cardigan.

At first glance I thought it was a "mock cardigan," one that looked as if it opened but didn't. But no, the small type said "full-zip front." Was it a mock turtleneck? It was -- but that didn't answer for sure whether "mock" was short for "mock turtleneck" or part of the name. Many of the clothing items, like Oscar Mayer's bologna, seemed to have both a first name and a second name: Pine Tree, Still Creek, Misty Ridge, West Valley.

Scouting the catalog, I found a clue. Personal names for garments, as opposed to place names and tree names, tended to be one-word: Wanetta, Marylee, Katee. So although Addie Mock would be an excellent pioneer name -- an American Girl doll's name, say -- it looks as if the intention here is: Addie (Mock [turtleneck]) Cardigan.

As for that dotted swill: It's really dotted Swiss, a lightweight cotton with allover dots (usually) woven or embroidered into it, a sweet fabric for little girls and little curtains. The "Swiss" is short for "Swiss muslin," says the OED; it dates "dotted Swiss" to an 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog offering a shirt "with wide pleated puff bosom of snow white dotted Swiss." Sounds like something Addie Mock might have liked.

At the end of Sunday's column item on using consequence as a verb, I asked, "will naughty children and criminals someday be consequenced?"

Well, it's not standard English yet, but it has found a niche, e-mails D., who works at a residential treatment center for adolescents. "Not only are they consequenced, but there is a Consequence Log," she writes. "The teenagers have even shortened the verb to 'quence, as in 'Are you gonna 'quence me?' "

Those kids, apparently, are truly on the cutting edge (or the clipping edge, I should say, since that's what they're doing to the word consequence). There are several hundred Googlehits for the verb consequence, but so far their 'quence seems to appear only as a typo for quench.

Exercising or recreating?

Should we maintain the orthographic distinction between re-create (to create again) and recreate (have fun)? Editrix wants to keep the hyphen, despite the lack of support from her reference library, and she's posted a poll where readers can vote.

I infer from the discussion that I was probably already a copy editor when Editrix was riding her tricycle. Because I was taught, during my usage indoctrination, that recreate meaning "play, amuse oneself" was a low sort of verb, if not actually forbidden.

I remember that at some point it became OK, but I must not have ever looked it up, because it turns out it's not -- as I vaguely assumed -- a back formation from recreation; in fact, it's older than the other recreate, and its current "have fun" sense dates to 1587!

But the OED has one clue to my instructors' prejudice: It labels recreate "Now chiefly U.S." A good many words that were dropped by the Brits, but retained by us colonials, suffered a temporary loss of status among educated Americans; maybe recreate was one of them.

My search among the usage books, however, hasn't done much to validate my memory. Nobody denounces recreate "play"; the prissy Wilson Follett, who's still proselytizing (in 1966) for the shall/will distinction, says of recreate merely -- this one's for you, Editrix -- that the hyphen must stay: "Only the hyphen can distinguish re-create (create anew) from recreate (amuse, divert)."

But thanks to Paul Brians, I know my animus wasn't just a fantasy. At his Common Errors in English website, Brians is still keeping the faith: "While we’re at it, 'recreate' does not mean 'to engage in recreation.' If you play basketball, you may be exercising, but you’re not recreating."

I no longer believe it, but I sure was glad to find it.

Photo: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

You didn't even know it was broken? Neither did I, till last week, when someone told me that subscribing to the Word blog brought readers posts from Brainiac, the other Ideas blog, written by Christopher Shea. (Once upon a time, when the Word blog was a baby, it was a subset of Brainiac.)

For a one-click subscription, look for my name at Boston.com's RSS page: http://www.boston.com/tools/rss/globe/#author.

While our media have to deploy the f-word to attract official attention, in England all it takes to offend is bloody -- even though nobody has ever connected the word conclusively to anything offensive.

Last week, the Guardian reported that

A cheeky ad by the Sun gloating about Britain winning more medals than Australia at the Beijing Olympics, using a twist on Australia "Where the bloody hell are you?" tourism, has been banned by the advertising regulator.

The ad featured as a giant billboard on a truck comparing Britain's 19 Beijing gold medals alongside Australia's 14 with the strapline "Where the bloody hell were you?"

Rupert Murdoch's News Group argued that the ad was a "light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, and gentle ribbing" of Australia. But the British Advertising Standards Authority said bloody was a swearword, not to be blazoned on buses for children to read.

Bloody is far more acceptable in Australia, but even there, the original tourist ad catchphrase -- "Where the bloody hell are you?" -- was hard for some to swallow. Prime Minister John Howard defended its use, but wouldn't repeat it on the air: "I'm not somebody who uses that expression, certainly not on radio," he told an interviewer in 2006.

As I say in today's Word column, it was a very good year for language books of all kinds. Here are a few more worthy titles that didn't make it into the print list:

"An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction," by Anatoly Liberman (University of Minnesota, $50). When a dictionary labels a word "origin unknown," it doesn't mean there aren't any good guesses. In this introductory volume of Liberman's project, he treats 55 English words of uncertain origin, from older (clover, toad) to newer (pimp, jeep), laying out the arguments for various etymologies and explaining which is most likely.

"Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling," by David Wolman (Collins, 24.95). In the course of this engaging ramble through our orthographic thickets, Wolman visits the Gutenberg Museum, pickets the Scripps National Spelling Bee, gets tested for dyslexia, and investigates the progress of spellchecking.

"When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge," by K. David Harrison (Oxford, $17.95). A linguist's close-up guide to some of the many ways of knowing -- of mapping, counting, keeping time, preserving history -- embedded in languages that are disappearing.

"Let's Talk Turkey: The Stories Behind America's Favorite Expressions," by Rosemarie Ostler (Prometheus, $18.98). Homegrown idioms explained (except when they're inexplicable) by a careful researcher and entertaining writer.

"I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like: A Comprehensive Compilation of History's Greatest Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes," by Mardy Grothe (Collins, $14.95). Well, some are greater than others, but you're sure to find something memorable, like Brigitte Bardot's "Peanut butter is pate for children."

"Four-Letter Words: And Other Secrets of a Crossword Insider," by Michelle Arnot (Perigee, $13.95). I don't do crosswords much (I'm a double-crostic fan), but I found this guide enjoyable until -- through some binding error, presumably -- instead of the last chapter, my advance copy had 20-plus pages of one of those "Law of Attraction" books. (An Amazon search suggests that final copies are all fixed -- though maybe there's a market for the crossword-law of attraction combination?)

Previously mentioned in the course of 2008:

"The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus," by Joshua Kendall (Putman, $25.95). The life and times of Peter Mark Roget before he was a household name.

"Grammar for the Soul: Using Language for Personal Change," by Lawrence A. Weinstein (Quest, $16.95). A writing teacher and playwright explores some psychological aspects of punctuation and grammar.

"The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English," by Mark Abley (Houghton Mifflin, $25). What's happening to English in L.A., Japan, cyberspace, and beyond.

Reader Amy Kaufman is puzzled, she says in an e-mail, by a usage in the book "How Starbucks Saved My Life," by Michael Gates Gill. The sentence in question: "Fortunately, a train came quickly, and I rode up to Ninety-sixth Street in a grateful jangle of swaying noise and screeching rails."

Ignoring for the moment the mystifying "swaying noise," what I am wondering about is the "grateful jangle." I'm sure the author means that he, not the jangle, was the grateful one.

Grateful applied to a thing rather than a person sounds odd to me too -- a bit poetic or archaic -- but according to my dictionaries, grateful meaning "gratifying" is still standard usage. Says American Heritage, 4th edition: "Affording pleasure or comfort; agreeable." Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate: "affording pleasure or contentment; PLEASING."

As it happens, the inanimate grateful came up in a recent Language Log post about the use of the word "welcome" in a quote from Barack Obama: "I'll be welcome to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle."

Such "role-shifting" by words is not unusual, wrote Mark Liberman, who cited grateful -- though he too was under the impression that its application to inanimate things was obsolete: "Thus grateful used to be used to mean not only "feeling gratitude", but also (alternatively) "engendering gratitude", i.e. (OED sense 1) "Pleasing to the mind or the senses, agreeable, acceptable, welcome." He gave the OED's 1814 quote from Sir Walter Scott: "Enjoying the grateful and cooling shade."

Ungrateful, not surprisingly, behaves the same way. The OED quotes, among other examples, "Certain foods are recognised, consciously or not, as grateful or ungrateful" (1897).

It may be ungrateful news in some quarters, but Gill's "grateful jangle" is good -- and current -- English.

It was only last month that I complained about the way "mic" for "microphone" makes me squint, so I was pleased to find fev at Headsup: The Blog -- in a post triggered by a headline with "Pads" for "Padres" -- casting a solid vote on my side.

In the beginning, he says, it was simple:

I had a bike, and a parental unit named Mike, and a reasonable pre-Sesame Street idea of what that "silent E" thing was up to. "Mike" seemed like the sensible way to shorten "microphone," partly because that's what grownups and experts did. …

So imagine my surprise, years later, to find out that I was apparently an irrational loony. "Open mike" means an Irishman in surgery! There's no "k" in "microphone"! Everybody knows the only proper spelling is "mic"!

What we're watching here, he says, is the a rule evolving and maybe changing, according to younger readers' notion of what's "natural."

If I was in charge of the how-to-spell-clippings rule, it'd look something like:
Most clippings are words on their own. Spell them the way you pronounce them. If a clipping resembles an existing word, you should expect people to read it that way.

That is: Many people will read "Pads" as "pads" (not "pods," as in Padres), and will see "miced" and think it rhymes with "sliced." That's the way our spelling conventions work … for now.

(Reuters Photo by Jessica Rinaldi)

Just as I was finishing up today's column about the swearing-on-TV case before the Supreme Court, Geoff Nunberg weighed in at Language Log on the side (theoretically) of the FCC, arguing that the F-word "can only work in its figurative meanings if it remains dirty in its literal meaning."

[When cultural liberals] uphold people's right to use this sort of language in public against the attempts to censor or limit it, they think of themselves not just as defending free speech, but as striking a blow against sexual repression and hypocrisy.

But taboo words have deeper roots, he thinks.

[D]irty words are magic spells that conjure up their references. We first learn about dirty words at an age when we still believe literally in magic, and I don't think anything we learn afterwards palliates their irrational power. That's why we behave as if we could render them inefficacious by the simple expedient of using asterisks in place of some of their letters -- magical spells have no power unless you say them just so.

Not all of the (several dozen) commenters are persuaded, but it's a terrific discussion.

If you missed the NPR interview on this topic with Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the OED and author of "The F-Word," hear it here.

And for another funny (semi-)dirty-word discussion, see John McIntyre's blog, here and here, on the brouhaha that ensued after his employer, the Baltimore Sun Group, published an issue of its youth-oriented free tabloid, B, with the one-word headline "Douchebag!" There's more to the story, he swears -- and demonstrates -- than "Those Damn Kids/Those Old Crocks predictabilities."

Ronald Reagan believed that enormity meant "vastness": ''I have always been well aware of the enormity of [the job of President]," he said in 1981. William Safire thought that was just fine: "The time has come to abandon the ramparts on enormity's connotations of wickedness," he wrote that same year in his New York Times language column.

Bill Clinton agreed. "Our support of reform must combine patience for the enormity of the task and vigilance for our fundamental interests," he said in his 1994 State of the Union speech.

Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, education activist, and Ph.D. in English, did too: "The enormity of the honor ... is just sinking in," Cheney said, more than once, after her husband's nomination.

Now Barack Obama is on the bandwagon; he has spoken of "the enormity of the task that lies ahead" in both post-election speeches.

Will this be the administration that ends the nitpicking over enormity?

A few critics are already tut-tutting, because for a century and more we've been told by usage writers to use enormity only for "great wickedness."

Dictionaries have not necessarily agreed. Webster's Second unabridged (1934, 1959) defined enormity as "State or quality of exceeding a measure or rule, or of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous." And the earliest English sense, says the OED, was "Divergence from a normal standard or type," reflecting the etymology of the word, literally "outside the norm."

The use of enormity to mean merely "vastness" dates to the late 18th century; in the late 19th, an editor of the OED added the note "this use is now regarded as incorrect." The American Heritage Usage Panel, as of 2002, agreed, by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent. But the disapproval rating was down sharply from 1967, when 93 percent rejected enormity for "hugeness."

And the naysayers have never prevailed upon actual usage, as the multitude of quotations under enormity in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage shows. The sense presidential speechwriters like -- implying "a size that is daunting or overwhelming" -- is one of the commoner figurative uses.

Grant Barrett, language blogger and co-host of the radio show "A Way With Words," takes a middle ground on enormity: He doesn't disapprove of Obama's usage, "but I also believe that since the term is a bit 'skunked,' -- that is, there is a dispute about proper usage -- that in a speech of historical importance it should have been avoided."

On the other hand, this latest presidential seal of approval may help it get un-skunked faster. Wouldn't it be nice if four years from now, the dispute over enormity was forgotten?

(Photo: Rick Bowmer/Associated Press)

Well, I have just spent more time than I could spare at the new Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee site. Expugnable, ecchymosis, caitiff -- all those old bee friends are there, and some new ones too (hello, unau!).

I've been in a few real spelling bees -- local ones, to benefit public schools, and big-bucks corporate ones, to benefit the Literacy Foundation -- and they're fun, once you accept that luck plays a major role. Your team might get an ordinary word like abscission, or something unguessable, like haulm. ("Chiefly British. The stems of peas, beans, potatoes, or grasses.")

But for a spelling geek, the VT bee improves on the social version in a couple of satisfying ways. It gives you several tries -- infinite tries, for all I know -- to spell a word: cachumenal? cacuminole? cacumenal? -- only giving the answer when you click the surrender button (cacuminal: "Articulated with the tip of the tongue turned back and up toward the roof of the mouth").

And unlike a traditional spelling bee, it shuffles your misspelled words back into the list so you can try, try again. Urceole! Urceole! Urceole! ("A vessel for water for washing the hands.")

Ben Zimmer, executive editor of Visual Thesaurus, explains the inner workings of the bee, with graphs, at the Oxford University Press blog. The process is addictive, he says, because

it’s been designed to be adaptive, so the more words that are spelled correctly, the more difficult the words become. And conversely, if you’re not a great speller, the words will get easier and easier. That way a player will always be quizzed at the appropriate skill level.

The algorithm is constantly refining itself:

Every five minutes, words are rescored for difficulty taking into account the latest data from the Bee spellers. That means there’s an increasingly better fit to different skill levels. As the player continues to spell, the quiz narrows in on his or her score, on a scale from 200 to 800.

And if you're a Visual Thesaurus member, with a $19.99 subscription, the site will post your name and score when you rank in the top 10 spellers of the day or month.

Wear headphones, advises the site, but even with headphones I had trouble distinguishing between some initial-consonant pairs, like th/ph, v/b, and t/k; you want to look extra carefully at the (not always helpful) definitions when one of these consonants comes along.

Lionel Shriver, author of "The Post-Birthday World" and other novels, has an essay in today's Wall Street Journal about the missing quotation marks in modern fiction. Someone must have issued a memo, she writes, saying "Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore."

She thinks (and I, a traditionalist when it comes to fiction, agree) that making the reader do the work of quotation marks has a downside.

By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous. Surely what should distinguish literature isn't that it's hard but that it's good.

And, she argues, omitting quote marks makes it hard to turn up the volume of dialogue. Reading a line like

Is this what you're like with LizAnn? I heard myself scream,

you don't hear the scream; it's "like watching chase scenes in 'The Bourne Supremacy' with the sound off."

But there are a couple of problems with the example she has chosen for her demonstration, a passage from Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men":

You could head south to the river.

Yeah. You could.

Less open ground.

Less aint none.

He turned, still holding the handkerchief to his forehead. No cloud cover in sight.

Shriver then gives the same passage with quotes:

"You could head south to the river."

"Yeah. You could."

"Less open ground."

"Less aint none."

He turned, still holding the handkerchief to his forehead. "No cloud cover in sight."

With the quotation marks added, "Is that landscape any less vast?" she asks.

But her repunctuation poses other questions. Why put "No cloud cover in sight" in quotation marks? I read it as the author's voice, not the character's.

More problematic yet: These lines of "dialogue" aren't really. They're interior monologue; Llewellyn Moss (played in the movie by Josh Brolin, above) is alone in the West Texas desert, debating his options. The monologue-styled-as-dialogue goes on:

You need to be somewhere come daylight.

Home in bed would be good.

Punctuating those back-and-forth thoughts as separate utterances wouldn't be appropriate when they're really one person's musings. Maybe italics would work -- at least then we'd know whether the "cloud cover" line is meant as a thought balloon (her interpretation) or part of the narrative (mine).

I'm still with Shriver in general; I pump my own gas and load my own groceries, but I'd rather not be asked to bring my own punctuation. But the McCarthy excerpt isn't the example that proves the point.

In today's On Language column, William Safire argues that our modern streamlining of the old saying "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" does violence to the original. Shortening it, as Gwen Ifill did on TV recently, to "the proof is in the pudding" has "leached out its historical meaning," says Safire.

I've written about "the proof is in the pudding" before, but unlike Safire and Michael Quinion, whom Safire quotes, I thought the expression remained pretty transparent in its short form. "The proof is in the pudding" surely implies that you taste the pudding -- nobody takes it to mean that the proof is conceealed inside the pudding, like a fortune in a fortune cookie.

But I'd never looked into the age of the short version. Its popularity is relatively new -- you can tell that by the fact that many of us grew up with the long form, while there are younger people have heard only the short form -- but is the phrasing itself a 20th-century innovation?

It is not, it turns out. Google Books finds it in an 1863 novel by D.S. Henry: "The proof is in the pudding -- or the turkey if you please, so I will even ring for it."

It shows up in the British Farmer's Magazine in 1867: "Although, as the proof is in the pudding, as seen at this and other gatherings, there was ample material even without cattle, to make a capital show."

And in the U.S., in "The Aunts' Cook Book" in 1922:

Love's protestations naught confirm,
Despite all would-and-shoulding;
Love's labour marks the final test,
The proof is in the pudding.

After the mid-20th century there are abundant examples to choose from, but perhaps my favorite comes from "Acid Test," a 1963 collection by the sharp-tongued theater and film critic John Simon. Simon has long been an outspoken usage traditionalist, but not in this case: "Ultimately, however," he writes, "the proof is in the pudding, and there is no more pudding-headed dramaturgy around town than in 'A Passage to lndia' and 'The Aspern Papers.'"

Perhaps Simon has since repented of his casual usage. But if he didn't see a problem with "the proof is in the pudding," I can pretty much guarantee that the campaign against it is doomed.

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words has thought for years that there was something fishy about the expression "red herring," meaning a false trail or distraction. If the red (smoked) herring scent was meant to lead foxhounds astray, who would have been laying down that trail, and why?

In today's weekly newsletter, however, he reports the mystery has been solved by a couple of scholars, and the newly verified story will soon take its place in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The metaphor had previously been traced to a 17th-century fox-hunting handbook suggesting that "a dead cat or fox should be dragged as a training-scent for the hounds, so that the horses could follow them. If you had no acceptably ripe dead animals handy . . . you could as a last resort use a red herring." But nothing in the source hinted that herring might be used to lay a false trail.

In fact, the false-scent sense apparently originated with journalist William Cobbett, "whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system."

He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off more important domestic matters: "It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone."

Red herring as "false scent" is of course deeply embedded in the language -- mere facts are not about to dislodge it from its metaphorical perch. But now we know that the story it's based on was one writer's politically useful yarn, not an ancient fox-hunting ritual.

In a couple of hours we'll be chewing over the highlights of the third presidential debate, but you'll still want to check out Ben Zimmer's nice column on the blended idiom Obama produced in debate no. 2: "green behind the ears."

Surely this is just a combination of green (as in naïve) and "wet behind the ears" (as in newborn and not yet dry in all the hollows). What's surprising is its age: Zimmer finds "green behind the ears" in print as early as 1924. And according to a couple of commenters, the variant exists in German too.

All these damp ears reminded me of "wash behind your ears," a familiar admonition from books if not from my own childhood. How did that area come to be singled out for special scrubbing?

Google Books turns up some references to washing behind the ears for therapeutic purposes -- headache cures and the like -- in the early 19th century. But the earliest reference to childish ablutions comes from the British humor magazine Puppet Show, in 1849, in a list of (supposed) etchings done by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (who really did do etchings):

-- Portrait of the Princess Royal. -- Portrait of the Princess Royal with her hair in papers. -- Portrait of the Princess Royal before having her face washed. -- Portrait of the Princess Royal refusing to allow the nurserymaid to wash behind her ears. --Portrait of the Prince of Wales being sent into the corner.

Then comes "Portrait of the Prince of Wales being sent into a corner," and so on.

This focus on ear cleanliness continues for more than a century. A few samples:

"'Bathe other people's children; but don't wash behind their ears.' -- That is to
say: Do not be servile in obsequiousness to others." (Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, 1885)

"I'll wash behind my ears too, without being told." (Lucy Maud Montgomery, "Anne of Avonlea," 1909)

"[W]ith the expression of a small boy who has been publicly exhorted to wash behind the ears, [he] said: "Some days he's here, some not." (Dorothy Sayers, "Busman's Honeymoon," 1937)

"[S]he would never really forgive him for being able to button his own buttons and wash behind his ears." (William Faulkner, "Intruder in the Dust," 1948)

Why the century-long ear thing? It must have been the intersection of the Industrial Revolution's built-up grime and the dawn of indoor plumbing, with its rising standards of cleanliness, that triggered it. A century or so later, getting really clean was no longer hard work, and we've gradually given up treating retroaural cleanliness as the index of a young person's hygienic competence.

In today's Wall Street Journal, wine columnists Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher do a "fact check" on a politically charged wine-and-cheese combo. Their conclusion, in the words of the subhead: "Whoever came up with this slam on liberal voters never tasted the pairing." Brie and chablis, they say, both deserve better partners.

They're tasting cap-C Chablis, of course -- the real French stuff, not the domestic "chablis" that comes in a jug. But linguistically that doesn't matter; we all know the phrase is about political flavors, not actual refreshments. So where did it come from?

Dottie feels it has something to do with Leonard Bernstein's famous party to raise legal-defense money from rich white liberals for a group of Black Panthers. … However, according to Tom Wolfe's famous, liberal-lampooning, satirical account of the party, the cheese served that night was Roquefort. ["Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts," in fact.]

The catchphrase "Brie and Chablis" to mean snooty liberal seems to have really caught fire during the third-party presidential campaign of John Anderson in 1980.

Sure enough, the earliest cite in the Nexis news database comes from a Mark Shields column in the Washington Post in April 1980: "For John Anderson to be a true challenger for the presidency, he cannot be either a 'spoiler' or simply the favorite of the brie-and-chablis set."

But during the '70s, political news stories do mention "wine and cheese" parties, generally for liberal candidates. In 1977, said the Washington Post, "There were garage sales, auctions jogging exhibitions, wine and cheese parties … all in the name of participatory democracy. For the most part, the campaigns were low-budget operations."

Wine and cheese, you may notice (or remember), has a somewhat different connotation from brie and chablis. In the '70s, a wine and cheese party is not what the Bernsteins were hosting on Park Avenue; it's a cheap and simple alternative to a cocktail party, beloved by tweedy professors and graduate students and young couples on a budget.

They were escaping from the sort of party fare Peg Bracken prescribed in her 1960 blockbuster, "The I Hate to Cook Book": processed cheese mashed up with port or bacon or onions, store-bought biscuit dough wrapped around anchovies and baked. If a platter of Jarlsberg and St.-Andre had been an option for the harried hostess, that processed cheese would have been off the menu quicker than you can say Olive-Oyster Dip.

So here's my theory: Wine and cheese parties come along with the foodie movement, as an obvious and convenient improvement on the bourbon-and-cheese puffs cocktail party. Around 1980, some political wordsmith notices that "brie and chablis" not only rhymes, it sounds much snootier than "wine and cheese," even though this chablis is probably California jug wine.

The mystery is that nobody has taken credit for the coinage. In a 2003 column, William Safire claimed that "the brie-and-Chablis set" was used by politicians in the '60s, but I suspect that's a shot in the dark. Safire himself doesn't use "brie and chablis" till 1983, nor does he have earlier citations of it in "Safire's Political Dictionary."

So I'm paging Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus, who among other feats of word sleuthing has tracked the legend of Churchill's "up with which I will not put." If Ben can't find the culprit, no one can.

And by the way, say Brecher and Gaiter: "According to a July Gallup poll, among Americans who consume any type of alcoholic beverage, 37% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats say wine is what they drink most often."

After last week's VP debate, reader James Maiewski e-mailed about a Sarah Palinism that struck him: "The way she uses 'that' as a demonstrative even when there's no apparent antecedent" -- for instance, "Americans are craving that straight talk."

"Any thoughts?" he asked. But there was no need to think: Real linguists have been parsing Sarah Palin so I don't have to. Before I even opened Maiewski's e-mail, Mark Liberman at Language Log had already laid out the terms of the that question, the stats, and the history, and comments on the subtleties of the "affective demonstrative" were rolling in.

There's more Palinalia, much more, at Language Log. Liberman also diagrams the Palin sentence that Maureen Dowd called undiagrammable and, separately, analyzes Palin's deployment of also. Geoff Nunberg disagrees with Steven Pinker's analysis of the "nucular" pronunciation Palin favors. And Arnold Zwicky explores Palin's so-called g-dropping and use of "gonna," asking, among other things, why the New Yorker chose (unusually) to transcribe it as "gonna" in its recent Palin profile.

And if you're curious about Paul J.J. Payack's assertion, repeated by CNN, that Palin spoke at an eighth-grade-plus level in the debate while Joe Biden clung by his fingertips to the seventh-grade level, go read Michael Covarrubias, at Wishydig, for a patient (and sometimes impatient) explanation of the utter silliness of the claim.

Today's "Curtis" has me utterly baffled. Why is it a good thing Coach Otlowski wasn't hired to teach English, aside from his general abusiveness? The only thing nonstandard in his speech is "chubbery," which seems like a reasonable enough coinage as a noun for collective chubbiness -- and more appropriate than "flab" for a bunch of kids.

Am I missing something?

UPDATE 10/5: Well, on Wednesday, "Curtis" made another stab at some bad English, when Coach said "It's them video games and textin' and iPods what's dunnit!"

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage -- and if you're reading this you want to own MWDEU -- says of demonstrative them:

It has been in use for about four centuries, and has still not reached respectability. In writing, then, you can expect to find it in the same places you would find words of similar status: In reported speech, in fictitious speech (especially of little-educated characters), and, especially in the 20th century, in the familiar usage of educated people when they are being humorous.

And of what used as a relative pronoun ("what's dunnit"):

As a relative pronoun, what is quite old, apparently having been introduced into Old English on analogy with some uses of quod in Latin. . . . Our present evidence shows that relative what survives in the United States primarily in Midland and Southern speech areas and is used chiefly by the little educated. It was once in frequent use by dialect humorists.

As for dunnit, it's what is often called "eye dialect" -- it looks nonstandard, but the pronunciation it represents is the one we all use. It wouldn't sound odd to Curtis and his classmates.

The Ridger's suggestion -- that Curtis is glad this bully isn't teaching English, a class where he's vulnerable -- strikes me as too subtle, especially given the (lack of) development of the theme since Tuesday. But we'll see where it goes.

Another deadline missed: As of 11:44 this morning, it's officially autumn. I meant to squeeze in a few more summer blog items, but unlike Arlo, I''m too late; my summer reading roundup, part 2, will now be a fall book report.

Still, the inexorable calendar is no reason not to share some of the Words I Noticed on My Summer Vacation.

No Bicycles No Walkers: When I saw this sign above a state highway in Ohio, warning of a construction zone ahead, the picture that popped up for me was a line of elderly shoppers forced to push their walkers around the block on a detour. A blink later, I realized it meant "no pedestrians." I was led astray, I suppose, by the mismatch of terms: If the sign read "No Bicyclists No Walkers" it would have been clear it meant people, not mechanical devices. And besides, who ever heard of a bureaucrat choosing a normal word like "walkers" when he could have used "pedestrians" or "foot traffic"? That's what I call misleading.

Bunglehouse Blue: Every paint maker's fandeck includes some bizarre color names, but even in a world of Leisure Time, Taupe Trivia, and Eccentricity, Sherwin-Williams's Bunglehouse Blue leaped out at me. Choosing a paint is tough enough -- why tempt fate with something labeled a "bungle"?

But it turns out bunglehouse has a charming history: It comes from the Roycroft settlement in East Aurora, N.Y., a late-19th-century hotbed of Arts & Crafts design. The original bunglehouse, a converted chicken coop/blacksmith shop, now a museum, served as a studio for the artist Alexis Fournier. According to American Bungalow magazine, "Fournier named this idyllic but somewhat haphazard little building the 'bungle-house,' because, he said, 'it didn't deserve to be called a bungalow.'"

So paint in peace, bungle or no. Or if your home renovation is up to date, try the paint name game: I scored 7 out of 10, so I'm a Paint Color God. (In theory only: The unused gallons in the basement tell a different story.)

Give it to the Goodwill: This summer I heard my mom say "the Goodwill," which I couldn't remember hearing before in her (and my former) neck of the woods. "Give it to Goodwill," we said, or "Give it to charity." But of course it was "Give it to the Salvation Army."

"The Goodwill" is a minority option, but it doesn't seem to be a regionalism, like Southern Californians' calling highways "the 405" and "the 10." "The Goodwill" shows up all over the nation. Could be the influence of "the Salvation Army," "the dump," "the rummage sale." Could be that the specific use ("Let's stop at the Goodwill store") is influencing the generic use, or that the two versions are used in different situations. Or is it a generational thing? Readers, tell us what you say: Goodwill or the Goodwill?

It would be so cool if Abe Lincoln had been the first person to use cool to mean something like, you know, cool. That seems to be what William Safire, my wordie counterpart at the New York Times, is suggesting in today's column.

"Earliest use I can find in an ironic context -- meaning 'really something' -- is in the political speech" Lincoln gave on Feb. 27, 1860, says Safire:

The visitor from Illinois took on those who were threatening secession if an anti-slavery Republican were elected: "In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' "

But in the tradition of Honest Abe, I have to record a dissent. Lincoln's "That is cool" means something more specific than "that's really something"; today he might say "What chutzpah!" His highwayman analogy, in fact, is very like the classic example of chutzpah, the guy who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan.

But this sense of cool was not Lincoln's invention, nor even unusual. The 1852 edition of Noah Webster's dictionary has it: "3. Not hasty; deliberate; as, a cool falsehood or deception. Hence, 4. Impudent in a high degree, as when speaking of some trick, pretension, &c.;, we say 'that is cool.' "

Thanks to Google Books, it's easy to find the usage in 19th-century works. In Evelyn Benson's "Ashcombe Churchyard" (1862), for example, a man rebukes his sister for referring to a trouser pocket. "Upon my word," said George, "that is cool! let me never hear you dare to mention that part of a gentleman's dress, Lucy."

And the online Oxford English Dictionary, which just this month published an updated entry for cool, dates this use of the word -- "deliberately audacious or impudent in making a proposal, demand, or assumption" -- to 1723.

Lincoln's cool may well have led, decades later, to our modern cool -- so long-lived it's now labeled "colloquial" instead of "slang." But our cool isn't clearly attested till 1918, when the OED lists "*a cool kid" as one way of "expressing admiration for another's cleverness or cunning." Lincoln's cool may have been effective speechifying, but it was no novelty to his audience.

Update 2:30 p.m.: Mr. Verb has questions about "cool" too, and about some of the column's other assertions.

The photo of Lincoln, from the Slave Heritage Resource Center, is labeled as dating from the 1860 Cooper Union appearance where Lincoln said "That is cool."

Carrie and friends were surprised by L.A.'s scenes -- and sounds.

Marc McGarry e-mails to ask about a noun that seems all wrong: "Lots of people speak these days about 'a disconnect' between this and that. … What's wrong with 'disconnection'?"

Nothing is wrong with disconnection, the noun of the 18th and 19th centuries -- except maybe that it's a little bit long. But the 20th-century noun, disconnect, seems to have arisen separately from telephone company usage -- or so the OED's early citations suggest.

The first sense is "an act or instance of disconnecting; a break of (esp. electrical or telephone) connection." The evidence:

1951 N.Y. Times 22 Dec. 15/1 They were not liable when local law enforcement agencies provided information upon which a disconnect order was based. 1958 Los Angeles Times 19 Aug. B4/2 Now if someone would only invent a telephone that would sift out unwanted calls with a disconnect on the first ring. 1987 E. H. J. PALLETT Aircraft Electr. Syst. (ed. 3) ii. 40 When a disconnect has taken place, the indicator button is released from magnetic attraction.

Then there's sense 2, "a complete lack of understanding, agreement, or consistency; a discrepancy":

1983 N.Y. Times 17 June B6/5 There is a total, absolute disconnect between the Administration and the Congress as to what the armed forces are to do. 1993 Coloradoan (Fort Collins) 16 Jan. A8/5 Experts on the presidency routinely talk about there being a ‘disconnect’ or ‘disengagement’ between what candidates promise on the campaign trail and what they say and do once they are elected. 2002 Business Week 5 Aug. 54/1 In a disturbing disconnect, Stanley Furniture Co ... has seen furniture sales slide even as the housing industry has continued to boom.

Me, I experienced a disconnect over disconnect back in 2000, when an episode of "Sex and the City" set in Los Angeles showed Carrie hearing the word for the first time. "Disconnect?" she asked wonderingly. Even in a series with few pretensions to plausibility, I didn't buy the notion that a New York writer would be learning this word only in 2000, and from a Los Angeles hustler at that. See that first citation, dated 1951? That's the New York Times, deploying disconnect seven years ahead of the L.A. Times. Would it take a Carrie Bradshaw 49 years to catch up with it? I don't think so.

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, which picked up last month's Word column about semicolons, I heard from semicolon fans around the world -- sending me back for another round on the topic in today's column.

Even there I didn't have space for all the good semicolon comments from readers, so here are some of the highlights:

* Meredith Rose e-mailed from Australia: "Loved your piece ‘Sex and the Semicolon’ and couldn’t resist emailing to tell you of an Australian writer, Xavier Herbert ("Poor Fellow My Country," among other novels), who so hated the semicolon he sawed the key off his typewriter. Guess that meant he didn’t use colons either."

Actually, Herbert is quoted in Sean Monahan's 2003 biography, "A Long and Winding Road," saying "Why use a Semicolon (which is an ugly thing) when you can use a Colon, which has symmetry?" So the tale is probably apocryphal, though entertaining.

* Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, sent along a link to his post on the semicolon -- in Orwell's prose and his own -- from Emerson College's ArtsJournal.

* B.G. Thorpe mentioned an appreciation of the Bembo typeface used in the text with "the first ever printed semi-colons," in Aldus Manutius's "De Aetna," 1495. "How can anyone know that that is true?" asked Thorpe.

No one can, of course -- they mean it's the earliest extant printed semicolon; there might have been earlier semicolons that failed to survive. But Aldus gets the credit generally: In Slate, Paul Collins wrote that ancient Greeks used the semicolon as a question mark, and "after classical scholar and master printer Aldus Manutius revived it in a 1494 font set, semicolons slowly spread across Europe."

Lynne Truss also credited Aldus with the semicolon in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," and so does the National Library of Scotland, which has Aldus works in its rare books collection, and probably knows whereof it speaks.

* Jesse Jones was inspired by the semicolon column "to re-read the clever short story 'The Creative Impulse' by Somerset Maugham, which pointedly has a density of semicolons."

I haven't read the story, but I found this tantalizing excerpt, which introduces Mrs. Albert Forrester as a writer who "in a flash of inspiration ... had discovered the comic possibilities of the semi-colon":

She was able to place it in such a way that if you were a person of culture with a keen sense of humour, you did not exactly laugh through a horse-collar, but you giggled delightedly. … [W]hatever else you might say about Mrs Albert Forrester you were bound to admit that she was able to get every ounce of humour out of the semi-colon and no one else could get within a mile of her.

* Finally, both Marc McGarry and Peter Ash wrote to remind me that "Wit," the 1999 play by Margaret Edson, makes much of the importance of punctuation in Donne's "Death Be Not Proud." A teacher tells the protagonist that the end of the poem should read,

And death shall be no more,
Death thou shalt die.

A semicolon after "more" is too much, says the professor: "Nothing but a breath -- a comma -- separates life from life everlasting."

So if you can't go admire Emerson's semicolon in Concord to mark National Punctuation Day, you might watch the film version of "Wit," starring Emma Thompson, instead. Or maybe you, like me, are ready for a little vacation from the semicolon.

"Near Cape Cod" -- does that sound normal to you, or a little bit weird? The question has been bugging me since late July, when the news broke that syndicated columnist Robert Novak had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Several sources, including the AP and the New York Times, reported that Novak had been taken ill while he was on a family vacation "near Cape Cod."

That phrase struck me as unusual, at least for New Englanders. What's "near Cape Cod"? Maybe, if you were telling someone from Burbank or Mumbai where Buzzards Bay was, you might say "near Cape Cod." But in common usage, vacation spots are generally on the Cape or off the Cape, not "near the Cape."

So where was Novak? In a column about his illness published Sunday, he explained:

My wife, Geraldine, and I left Washington on Saturday to spend the weekend with our daughter, Zelda, and her husband, Christopher Caldwell, and their children at their summer house at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.

Near Cape Cod? No. Near Cape Ann, northeast of Boston? Yes. Part of Cape Ann, even, according to the Chamber of Commerce, which lists Manchester, Essex, Gloucester, and Rockport as the Cape's four towns.

And where did the mixup come from? The earliest reports with "near Cape Cod" quote a statement at the website of the Chicago Sun-Times, Novak's home newspaper, that's no longer available, but that seems to credit the information to Novak's assistant, Kathleen Connolly.

Did Connolly name the wrong Cape, or did someone else goof writing down her quote? I'm trying to track down the origin of the error, though it may prove impossible. But I feel better knowing that "near Cape Cod" really was just as fishy as it smelled when I first encountered it.

As I mention in today's Word column, I met the other Jan Freeman, the poet and publisher from Ashfield, Mass., last week, after learning that she, like me, had fans -- relatives, even! -- who didn't know we were two different people.

There's no particular reason one's name-sharer should share any other traits, of course, but when two women have come from elsewhere and settled in Massachusetts for careers in publishing, it's also no surprise when they do have things in common. We arrived at the DeCordova Museum, our meeting place, in our respective Subarus; we drank diet Cokes and agreed that a milkshake -- the real kind, with ice cream -- is the the appropriate treat for anyone still numb from a dental procedure (don't ask). We confessed to literary or otherwise clever names for dogs past and present.

That's the prosaic Jan (me) in the top photo, and the poetic Jan in the one to the left.

The other Jan -- who, of course, thinks of me as "the other Jan" -- grew up near Philadelphia, lived in Ohio and New York City, and came here in the '90s to found Paris Press, which has published prose and poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and others.

I've known of the other Jan's existence since 2000, when a Globe colleague handed me a copy of "Simon Says," her second book of poems, with what looked like my byline on the cover. But I hadn't suspected she was fielding so many Word questions till this summer, when my own cousin asked about "my" poetry reading in Hartford, and I decided to investigate.

So for the record, here we are, in not especially flattering snapshots (another point on which we agree). And here too, as a memory aid for our confused friends and relations, are a few lines from the poetic Jan. (And that's definitely not me.)

A Winter's Story

Once a bear found a yellow window
and she sat beside the window during the day
She watched the dogs eat breakfast and clean their paws
She watched a lady wash dishes and eat a piece of bread covered with jam
Once a bear slept through winter and dreamed of a yellow window
No one woke the bear
Snow covered her den
Night and day were the same for the bear
Once a woman lit a fire
and imagined that the flames were cities,
people ran from door to door leaving gifts and love letters
Sometimes they ate bread and jam and watched the fire
Once two dogs slept during the day and cleaned their paws
at the same time in the late morning and early evening
They ate spaghetti for special occasions
and slept side by side
Once the sky was the sky
and no one spoke to the meadow
The maples waved through loneliness
The hilltop was a flag signaling seasons changing
Some birds slept in the maples some slept in the birch
Some were loyal, some were fickle
Once an orange fish noticed a bear admiring herself in the pond's reflection
Once a bear grabbed an orange fish under water
She stuffed it in her mouth
Better than jam and bread, she said
The dogs saw the bear and ran to the hilltop
The lady watched the dogs run and followed them with a long gun
The maples and birch swayed happily
The dogs and the lady stood beside them
and watched the bear swallow the orange fish
No one thought about the yellow window
They all ran around outside
and then the snow fell like feathers onto the ground.

Friendship Song

Empathy sympathy empathy kiss
empathy hold sympathy kiss
sympathy sympathy empathy hold
empathy hold kiss hold
sympathy kiss sympathy kiss
sympathy kiss empathy hold
empathy hold kiss hold
empathy sympathy kiss hold
hold kiss empathy hold
kiss hold sympathy kiss
kiss kiss kiss kiss
sympathy empathy kiss hold

Oh, no -- it's back! Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post's book critic, has favored readers with a back-to-school appreciation of Strunk and White's unkillable usage manual, "The Elements of Style":

For half a century "The Elements of Style" has been my constant companion. ... It is that to this day, and if someone wants to toss it in the box with me when I go six feet under, that would be fine; it might actually assure my passage through the Pearly Gates, since Saint Peter no doubt is a gentleman of impeccable grammatical taste.

But Yardley, who calls himself a Strunkaholic, credits the wrong author with some of the rules he finds so helpful. The 1959 book (and later editions) is packed with midcentury fetishes that E.B. White subscribed to, but that Strunk -- already deceased when White took on the expansion of Strunk's "little book," published in 1918 --- had not.

Yardley notes, for instance, that Strunkaholics mustn't confuse which and that. Strunk, however, did not follow this rule: He uses the restrictive which that White theoretically opposes. For instance, Strunk says:

Thanking you in advance. This sounds as if the writer meant, "It will not be worth my while to write to you again." Simply write, "Thanking you," and if the favor which you have requested is granted, write a letter of acknowledgment.

But wait, there's more: Even E.B. White used restrictive which (or perhaps left out a comma?) on the first page of "Stuart Little," as Geoffrey Pullum noted at Language Log: ''Mrs. Little ... weighed him on a small scale which was really meant for weighing letters."

And if Strunk believed that none must take a singular verb -- a "rule" unknown for most of the history of English -- I can't find him saying so in the little book. Usage tastes changed between Strunk's heyday and White's, just as they have changed since 1959.

As I wrote a few years ago, the book has a lot of silly or half-explained "rules" and a little advice about writing that's fine if you're already a good enough writer to apply it.

But treating "Elements" as a bible of good usage is literally laughable. Read through the chapter on "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused": If you can get past the entry for "Clever" with a straight face, you've got too much self-control for your own good.

Several readers of this week's Word column have asked if "tit for tat" plays a role here -- either in the history of tats as an abbreviation for tattoos or in my (mild) aversion to the word tats.

Says one faithful reader (after apologizing preemptively): "I couldn't help but think that the origin of 'tit for tat' must have been a strip show catering to tattooed sailors."

But tit for tat is a different story entirely (except for irrepressible punsters and giggly middle-schoolers). It's an alteration of "tip for tap," a less gory version of "an eye for an eye," and has no more connection to tattoos than Tweety Bird's "I tawt I taw a puddy tat."

Tat, however, has a number of obscure senses besides those I mentioned in the column. The OED lists it, with an 1840 citation, as an abbreviation for a different tattoo, a pony native to India. Another tat, of about the same vintage, means "rag" -- origin uncertain, but it could be related to Old English tættec, also "rag." A tat is also a tangle of hair. And tats or tatts can mean loaded dice (1688) or, in Australian slang, teeth (1919).

Then there's the military tattoo, a drumbeat or bugle call signaling troops to return to quarters. That one began as tap-too in the 17th century, from the Dutch taptoe in same sense. Who'd have thought English had adopted tattoo three times, in three senses, from three different languages?

Tat's all for now!

A not-quite-finished headline from the Springfield, Ohio, News-Sun (dated Aug. 24 but still on the website in this form):

We're laughing with you, fellow editors, not at you; everyone who works on deadline eventually misses one of these. Even so, the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation -- also known as Hartman's, McKean's, Skitt's, or Muphry's Law -- all but guarantees that I'll be publishing something mockable in the next week or two. (Or maybe the retribution will fall upon those who sent me the link. Thanks, Vicki Croke and Mike Pingree, and good luck evading the Law, you guys!)

As the Globe and many others have reported, Somerville resident Jeff Deck and his buddy Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty to vandalism in Arizona, after they corrected some of the punctuation on a sign inside the Desert View Watchtower at Grand Canyon National Park.

The sign, unfortunately for the punctuation vigilantes, had been handpainted by the watchtower's architect, Mary Colter; they're paying $3,000 to have it restored.

Here's a photo of the sign, pre-correction, from Flickr, where you can find the original with large enough lettering to edit (remotely and theoretically, of course).

For more comments on the apostrophe hunters' bust, see Language Log (which provided the Flickr link), You Don't Say, The Greenbelt, and Watch Yer Language.

Since my Word column and blog post on the decline of the semicolon, defenders of the threatened mark have risen to support it against the calumnies -- "girly," "ugly," "pusillanimous," and the like -- that I quoted.

But Rachel Manwill has endorsed the semicolon with more than words: She has the mark tattooed on the back of her neck.

Manwill, an editor for PR Newswire in Washington, D.C., won over her mother with a "poetic" rationale for the tattoo:

I find the semicolon to be an appropriate metaphor or reminder for how I'd like to live my life. The placement of the tattoo is especially important. I forever struggle in making decisions; either I overanalyze and overthink even after the choice has been made, or I shoot from the gut or rely on emotion. The semicolon tattoo exists (on my neck) to remind me that my head and my body (gut/heart/emotions) are separate entities, but should also be used together as a fluid, cooperative unit.

As an editor, she naturally looked at a lot of typefaces before settling on 80-point Times New Roman. "I'm not particularly fond of TNR as a font to type with, but there's something very classic and appropriately elegant about using it" as a tattoo, she says.

And the (potentially) discreet location has worked out well. "My mom is very happy that it is easy to hide, but my editorial director likes to show it off to her colleagues and clients."

Erin McKean is both lexicographer and sewing maven, and the two vocations blend seamlessly today at her blog A Dress a Day. McKean asks whether the empire waist -- that style that makes Jane Austen heroines look so fetching, and real people so pregnant -- is fostering the notion that the "empire" is a location on the body.

She quotes a dress description: "It cinches at the empire (the ideal spot for a wrap to fall)."

"If you had never made the connection that 'empire' in this context refers to an actual empire, it would be completely logical to assume that 'empire' is a more genteel way to say 'high-waisted' or 'under bust,' right? Folk etymologies come up with explanations that seem logical and that fit the facts. Which is a simpler explanation: that a silhouette is named after some long-dead French people, or that the name is based on the part of the body it emphasizes?"

(Actually, it might make sense to have a name for that under-the-bust circumference, since the bra people -- the ones who are always claiming that 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10 women wear the wrong size, though how the heck would they know? -- always instruct you to measure there first. They could say it more economically: "Your cup size depends on the difference between your empire and your bust.")

If the usage catches on, McKean says, "I also look forward to finding out that the part of my body where the knee meets the calf is called 'the capri,' and that a little further down I have a 'clamdigger.' "

So there I was, waiting for takeout in the parking lot of Lobsta Land in Gloucester, and I switched on the radio, just in time to hear Bill Littlefield, of WBUR's "Only a Game," read a listener's e-mail.

The writer was castigating Littlefield for saying people could "take a closer listen" to the program online. Listen is a verb, not a noun, he said.

And he was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, I understand that people send off these protests in haste, consulting their dudgeon rather than their dictionary. But why, I ask every time, why do their targets meekly accept such rebukes, instead of checking the facts?

Bill gets partial credit, since he didn't actually apologize. Still, by airing the letter he implicitly conceded that the critic's point, thus helping reinforce his error.

Here's the scoop: Listen was a noun as early as 1788 (the online OED's oldest citation). In 1817, Jane Austen's sister Cassandra used it in a letter: "But that I was determined I would see the last, and therefore was upon the listen, I should not have known when they left the house." (Thanks to pemberley.com for the text.)

Listen, n., was in Webster's Second Unabridged 50 years ago (and probably earlier, but that's my edition), with a quote from Kipling: "I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer."

Even if this listen weren't in our dictionaries, that wouldn't make the usage wrong, of course -- but that's another point, one Erin McKean made so effectively in a recent column that I don't need to restate it here.

Olympics watchers may have noticed that the balance of power is shifting between two pronunciations of Beijing. As the word spreads, announcers are trying -- some of them, anyway -- to say bay-jing instead of the faux-French bay-zhing.

Yesterday on "All Things Considered," NPR's Anthony Kuhn explained why it's "j as in juice." And today the Globe ran an AP story on it, contrasting Brian Williams's correct pronunciation with Bob Costas and Meredith Vieira's bay-zhing.

Bay-zhing came into usage because it sounded more foreign, said one AP source, echoing a common explanation -- that we tend to add a foreign sound, appropriate or not, to an unfamiliar but non-English word. It's not that we have to pronounce foreign place names as native speakers do: We don't say Paree or Venezia. But the pronunciation should make sense in English, if not in its language of origin, and the -zh- in bay-zhing fails that test.

Ossetia is a tougher one. Steve Dodson at LanguageHat blogged about it last Sunday:

I realize none of the broadcasters and reporters have ever heard of Ossetia before, but you'd think the patterns of English spelling would clue them in to its proper pronunciation, ah-SEE-shə.* I suppose it's another case of hyperforeignification, like "bei-ZHING."

That's right, he said ah-SEE-shə. You can hear Ossetia pronounced at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary (though they give it four syllables, not LanguageHat's three): ah-SEE-she-ə.

But Russians say os-SET-ee-ə, and if you listen to BBC radio, you may have heard Russian interviewees using this pronunciation -- which the British broadcasters echoed, naturally enough.

Also, there's a fairly universal impulse to use so-called spelling pronunciations, or at least to overarticulate words, when you think your listeners might not recognize them without help. That might explain why consortium is losing its -sh- sound; on the other hand, it could hardly apply to species or controversial, which are going the same way.

At any rate, opinion remains mixed on Ossetia, but on Beijing, the bay-jing wing is coming on strong. Tune your tongues accordingly.

*The first syllable can be ah- or oh-; see the 88 comments on LanguageHat's post for much, much more.

Medal (verb, intransitive): To win a medal, as in a sports contest: "We were the first Americans to medal" (Jill Watson).

That’s the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, giving to medal its blessing, but you’ll find the verb in other current dictionaries too, though possibly labeled "informal."

When I wrote about to medal a decade ago, the online Oxford English Dictionary didn’t list the intransitive verb -- though it did have the transitive verb, which meant "bestow a medal upon," with a quote from Lord Byron in 1822.

The June 2008 revision of the entry, though, dates our intransitive to medal to a 1966 edition of the Valley News in Van Nuys, Calif: "Divers from the Rita Curtis ... Club gold-medaled in all of the events but three." The Washington Post adopted it in 1979: "Our women are coming along beautifully -- they’ve medalled well recently."

Ben Zimmer, who provided the OED's earliest citation, also noted that "there are much earlier usages of intransitive 'medal' in golf, referring to 'medal play' ('in which the score is reckoned by counting the number of strokes taken to complete a round by each side')"; he cited a report in the Port Arthur (Texas) News in January of 1926:

Phil Hesler, Tulsa professional, and Ross Youngs of San Antonio, New York Giant outfield star, medaled around the 18 holes with a best ball card of 68.

In fact. resistance to medaling has faded noticeably since I last explored the topic. This time around, the Olympic usage has provoked only a few objections.

Harry Pearson of the Guardian wrote a parodic paragraph or two on sports reporters' love of verbing, predicting we would hear reports of scandaling, furore-ing, and controversying.

In the Montreal Gazette, Martin Coles offered a plea for restraint:

I'm cringing at the thought of the upcoming assault on that poor little word "medal," as in "she medalled for the first time." Don't do it, sports commentators of the world. Don't meddle with the English language. "Medal" is a noun, not a verb.

And a few blogs have recently bemoaned the "new" verb. But most sticklers seem to have moved on. Are they all out campaigning against the verbing of podium?

Who’d have thought there was so much more to say about semicolons than I could fit into today’s Word column?

Trevor Butterworth would have, of course. His treatise on the macho prejudice against semicolons, available online, is stuffed with supporting quotes from the likes of James Wolcott:

The semicolon adds a note of formality, and informality has been all the rage for decades [in America]. 'Real' writing is butch and cinematic, so emphatic and declarative that it has no need of these rest stops or hinges between phrases.

Not all commentators focus on the semicolon’s alleged lack of masculine bravado. Jon Henley’s article in the Guardian last spring treats the semicolon debate as a French-British conflict -- a Gallic defense of "the point-virgule from the inexorable march of Anglo-Saxon inelegance" -- and it has a nice collection of non-sexy quotes:

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life. (George Bernard Shaw to T.E. Lawrence, on "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom")

They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature. (Gertrude Stein)

Three years earlier, Ian Jack of the Guardian wondered "whether the totality of American literature has fewer semi-colons than British literature," and a reader, Jo Clarke, undertook to dig up some answers for him:

I can report that "Tom Jones" has 5,604 semi-colons, the highest count among my random sample. But the most densely semi-coloned work is "Moby-Dick" with 4,174 semi-colons or 3.4 per 1,000 letters (as against 2.9 for "Tom Jones").

If you want to celebrate National Punctuation Day next month, I’ll be publishing (soon) a suggestion for a Boston-area site to visit. But if a meal is your idea of a proper observance, the NPD website has a recipe for meatloaf in the shape of a semicolon. (I’d be more inclined to celebrate the delicate mark with semicolon-shaped meringues, but then, I haven’t offered a recipe, have I?)

Finally, thanks to lexicographer Erin McKean, you can join the Semicolon Appreciation Society, which offers the T-shirts shown here, proclaiming your appreciation for one of the finer points of punctuation. And yes, they do come in real men’s sizes.

I’ve been out of town (that’s part of the reason for the yawning silence here), so I read this week’s Word column, by the redoubtable Erin McKean, on the boston.com website just now. And one line gave me a moment’s pause:

Someone, somewhere, is using [words like funner] with a disclaimer like "I know it's not a real word {hellip}"

If you read the print version, you didn’t see that {hellip} -- you saw (I hope) three dots, or ellipsis points . . . like these. I assume the {hellip} is code for ellipses, but with some crucial bit missing, so that what appears on screen is not the expected punctuation, but the command itself. It happens; just Google "hellip" for other examples, some in earlier Word columns.

There were two especially funny things about this hellip, though. First, that the phrase "not a real word" was followed by . . . a truly not-real word. Second, that the not-word fit the sentence so well: I took it, at first, as a mistyped "help!" -- the writer’s plea for indulgence in this use of a non-real word.

I’m not much of a neologizer -- with the dictionaries full of words I don’t know, I’m in no rush to coin new ones -- but in this case I’m tempted. Wouldn’t {hellip} -- or even hellip, without the curly brackets -- work nicely as slang for "I’ve just exceeded the limits of my knowledge, everything I say from here on will be just guesswork"? I for one would make good use of such a shorthand expression.

This week's Word column on language lies was all wrapped up on Friday, but the very next day, along came some more bad examples -- this time on NPR’s weekly quiz show, "Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me."

Guest host Adam Felber asked contestant Peter Bogdanovich three multiple-choice questions about word derivations, taken from a book by Karlen Evins called "I Didn’t Know That." Where does nag come from? Answer: It began as a Scandinavian word to describe the sound of rats gnawing annoyingly in the thatched roofs of dwellings.

Bzzzzzzzz! Well, "Scandinavian" is probably right. But the original word, nagga -- which meant "grumble" or "rub" in Old Icelandic -- has no special connection with the sounds of vermin in the thatch, so far as I could find out. (And doesn’t it seem unlikely that the sound of little teeth gnawing would keep a hard-working Viking family awake at night?)

Here’s what Take Our Word For It says about nag:

It is thought to come from a Scandinavian source, for Norwegian and Swedish have nagga "to gnaw, bite, nibble; to irritate." The English and Scandinavian words go back to the Indo-European root *ghen- "to gnaw." . . . Thus, a "nagging pain" is one which seems to gnaw at one and it is from this sense that the modern verb to nag derives.

Maybe the thatched-roof detail was borrowed from "Life in the 1500’s," the online word-origins hoax (which claims that "raining cats and dogs" derives from the animals’ thatched-roof refuge).

The next question was on "Charley horse," and the "answer" was that the term comes from a real horse who once worked (gallantly limping) at the Chicago White Sox ballpark. This Charley allegedly lent his name first to limping players, then to the condition causing the limp.

But the book that supplied this legend gives the date of Charley's service as the 1890s. Word sleuths have found several citations for charley horse from the preceding decade, and none of them mention ol’ Charley. The earliest citation, posted in 2005 at LinguistList, came from Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, who also wrote the “On Language” column in Sunday’s New York Times.

And though it mentions Chicago, it comes from the Boston Globe, in July 1886.

Several years ago, says the Chicago Tribune, Joe Quest, now of the Athletics, gave the name of "Charlie horse" to a peculiar contraction and hardening of the muscles and tendons of the thigh, to which base ball players are especially liable from the sudden starting and stopping in chasing balls, as well as the frequent slides in base running. Pfetlor, Anson and Kelly are so badly troubled with "Charley horse" there are times they can scarcely walk.

How can you ace a quiz when two of the three official answers aren't right? Peter Bogdanovich, you deserve a do-over.

Congratulations to Boston’s own Corby Kummer, who in today’s New York Times got a subtle status upgrade, jounalistically speaking. In the page one story on locally grown food, he is identified as "Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author."

It’s that the I'm talking about. Last year, and for 18 years before that, the Times called Kummer "a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly."

As the late Timesman Theodore Bernstein explained in "Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins" (1971), there are four levels of article use, corresponding with a person's fame (or notoriety). People at the top of their fields "need no identification at all (Beethoven, Shakespeare, Newton)."

Those in the second tier, "a cut or two lower," get a the: "Glinka, the composer; Uris, the novelist." Third-tier celebrities are "semiprominent": "John Ciardi, poet; Hideki Yukawa, physicist." (Or "poet John Ciardi," as I would write, though Bernstein wouldn’t.)

And fourth-tier wannabes are "struggling to be known": "Evelyn Whozis, a poet."

As Bernstein’s choices reveal, those middle tiers are slippery perches; I had to look up Hideki Yukawa. But earning that honorific the -- which means, essentially, "the novelist/composer/food writer, as of course everyone knows" -- is still an achievement to savor.

I learned the word inspirado only a few weeks ago, when Ben Zimmer, writing The Word column while I was on vacation, mentioned it in connection with Jack Black and his new "Kung Fu Panda" word, skadoosh:

Fans of Jack Black's oeuvre are already familiar with his inventive wordplay. When he first gained attention as one half of the satirical rock duo Tenacious D, he was prone to such neologisms as "inspirado," a zingier version of "inspiration."

But last night, I picked up Ammon Shea’s new book, “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages,” a ramble through the entire Oxford English Dictionary that includes a selection of Shea's favorite words. And there it was, between Insordescent and Interdespise:

Inspirado (n.) A person who thinks himself inspired.

That’s Shea’s definition, not the OED’s, so of course I went to the source, where I found:

Inspirado
A person who imagines himself, or professes, to be inspired.
1664 H. MORE Myst. Iniq., Apol. 545 The Sectarian Rabbles that phansy themselves such Inspiradoes. Ibid. 562 The boasting Inspiradoes of our Nation.

That is (the bibliography revealed), both citations come from Henry More’s "Modest Inquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity, The First Part, Containing a Careful and Impartial Delineation of the True Idea of Antichristianism," published in London in 1664.

Did anyone use the word in the centuries between H. More and J. Black? Presumably we'll find out when the OED editors get around to revising the I's.

Black, of course, gave his re-coinage of inspirado a different sense. Professor More, a Protestant philosopher, was writing in order to reconcile faith with reason, and his “inspiradoes” were probably demonstrating the "enthusiasm" he and his 17th-century soulmates disdained. But I’ll leave that part of the story for a commenter who knows more about the subject than Wikipedia and I do.

It could be scary, an e-mail from your editor with the subject line %&#$&$!!!. Luckily, I’m not an alarmist; I figured this was a mention, not a use, of the symbols for an unprintable expostulation, and so it was: The e-mail contained a link to a comment on an old name for such cartoon swearing:

The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as "undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more."

Mort Walker has been in the news lately -- the Wall Street Journal had a page one story last week on his search for a home for his valuable cartoon collection. And Nancy Friedman, at her Fritinancy blog, made another Walker coinage word of the week: Emanata, the squiggles that emanate from a character or object to reveal its state of being (worried, hot, in motion).

FULL ENTRY

Dan Kennedy’s press blog, Media Nation, is always worth reading, but it’s not usually about language in The Word’s relatively narrow sense.

Today, though, Kennedy takes aim at a long-discredited -- but still ambulatory -- myth about John Kerry's presidential campaign, revived this morning by the Boston Herald’s Margery Eagan:

Lots of us didn’t like Kerry: the faux Kennedy thing. The Brahmin-esque cadence. “Who among us,” he bellowed as often as McCain says “my friends.”

Not true, says Kennedy. The much-repeated and much-mocked quote Eagan is referring to is “Who among us doesn’t like Nascar?” which first appeared in Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column in 2004. But Kerry never said it. And, says Kennedy, "to the extent that the haughty 'who among us' construction was used to demonstrate that Kerry was not a man of the people, it's important to point out that it was all based on a falsehood" -- one repeated by the Times and other mainstream newspapers.*

It's not even true, says Kennedy -- who has done his Nexis research -- that Kerry had any special affinity for the phrase "who among us." And the whole sordid story was detailed at The Daily Howler nearly four years ago.

"Not to pick on Margery Eagan," concludes Kennedy. "The journalist who bears the responsibility for this is Maureen Dowd. But can we finally put this urban legend to rest?"

I guess we'll find out.

*The Globe used the quote just once, a few days after Dowd’s column, in a feature about whether Kerry’s speaking style was too formal. In it, (liberal) Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg commented on the "quote": "Sentences that begin with 'Who among us does not like . . . ' should end with 'Placido Domingo.' "

What with my near-daily dose of BBC News on the radio, I thought I was pretty current on British-American pronunciation differences: furore with three syllables (and an extra letter), vitamin with a short I (VITT-a-min), con-TROV-er-sy with a different stress, and so on.

But zebra rhyming with Debra? Weird! And yet true, at least in parts of England. Bidialectal linguist Lynne Murphy, who blogs at Separated by a Common Language, explains why she now says zebra two different ways:

I pronounce it (to the extent that my American articulatory organs allow) in the British way when I say (BrE)* zebra crossing (a pedestrian [AmE]* crosswalk marked by stripes on the road -- as seen on the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road). But when talking to my baby about toy animals, I revert to my mother tongue -- now my mothering tongue.

*BrE = British English, AmE=American English

In his hilarious commentary on today’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoff Nunberg recalls a time when it was telegrams, not text messages, that were going to “transform the language.” According to an 1848 essay by Conrad Swackhamer, a New York attorney and editor,

as people got used to sending and receiving telegrams and reading the telegraphed dispatches in the newspapers, they would inevitably cast off the verbosity and complexity of the prevalent English style. The "telegraphic style," as Swackhamer called it, would be, "terse, condensed, expressive, sparing of expletives, and utterly ignorant of synonyms," and would propel the English language toward a new standard of perfection.

Now we’re all aflutter at the idea that text message is going to change English forever -- a notion irresistible to journalists, says Nunberg, because

it combined three themes that have been a staple of feature writing for 150 years: "the language is going to hell in a handbasket"; "you'll never get me onto one of those newfangled things"; and "kids today, I'm here to tell you."

Nunberg zings the Globe for rising to the bait:

The Boston Globe published an editorial called "the revenge of e. e. cummings" that had no capital letters and was laced with LOL's and texting abbreviations. It had me wondering which is more embarrassing, hearing old people use teenage slang or hearing them make fun of it.

Decide for yourself: You can read Nunberg’s text here, or listen to the broadcast here.

Stormy weather has been sabotaging beach plans this summer, but the climate has been ideal for afternoons of reading; for the first time in a year, my stack of must-read word books is shrinking rather than growing. Here are some snack-size samples from the (more or less) recent titles I’ve been catching up with:

Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, by Seth Lerer (Columbia University Press)

“During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, manhood found its challenges not just from the temptations of the telephone, but from the allure of aestheticism. The word dude was picked up in the early 1880s to define the new dandy of that movement. But it had appeared earlier, in the late 1870s, to describe the fastidious man of the city. The artist Frederic Remington wrote to a friend, in 1877, 'don’t send me any more [drawings of] women or any more dudes. Send me Indians, cowboys, villans [sic] or toughs.' . . .

"By the early 1880s the word was everywhere. New York newspapers made sport of it. Provincial papers noted its spread. Even Ulysses S. Grant deployed it (conscious of its recent coinage) in his Memoirs: 'Before the car I was in had started, a dapper little fellow – he would be called a dude at this day – stepped in.'"

The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, by Mark Abley (Houghton Mifflin)

"For people in eastern Europe a generation ago, the allure of English was not technological but political. Moscow walls in the 1980s were alive with graffiti like QUEEN GROUP THE BEST and KISS FAN (a fan of the rock group Kiss, that is). Russian bands, such as Primus, attracted smaller amounts of graffiti. When a graffiti writer wanted to celebrate Primus, he used English: PRIMUS FANS. But if he disliked their music or their style, he reverted to Russian: PRIMUS GOVNO ('Primus is s---’). English became the language of adoration. After the Soviet Union collapsed, young Russians began to realize that the West was not the paradise of their fantasies. But regardless of politics, the language of rock, and more recently of rap, continues to be an object of European desire."

FULL ENTRY

After I used the word "e-mails" in a recent column, an e-mail arrived from someone identified only as limblob@isga.com:

I'm only in the 6th grade, but it made me laugh to see you use e.-mails for more than one. Even our class knows that mail can be used as either singular or plural. My friend says that you should use e- mail messages for multiple. Sorry to be a pain.

But I didn’t bother replying, because I’ve tried that already -- back in December, when "limblob" sent me a nearly identical rebuke:

I'm only in the 5th grade, but it made me laugh to see you use e.-mails for more than one. Even our class knows that mail can be used as singular or plural. My friend says that you should use e.-mail messages for multiple.

On that occasion, I tried to send the eager young scholar a copy of a Word column from 2004 in which I discussed whether "e-mail" had to follow the model of "mail." But my attempt came back as undeliverable. Looking a bit further, I learned that "Limblob" is a rude nickname for Rush Limbaugh.

It seems unlikely that a sixth-grader would adopt a disparaging nickname for himself and send out unanswerable e-mails (yes, e-mails!). But then, it seems unlikely anyone else would do it, too. I would have thought an everyday e-mail pseudonym would be more than enough anonymity for a discussion of English plurals. But maybe I don’t understand true paranoia.

Anyway, "limblob," if you’re out there, please take a look at my column on “e-mails." And write again sometime -- with a return address.

From my multilingual friend Wahyd Vannoni comes a link to a tale of a language-testing scandal in Italy, as reported last month in Corriere delle Sera, along with a summary in the language I actually read:

An official English-language exam organized by Italy's tourism ministry was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Apparently the official responsible for selecting the text copied and pasted an article written by a Yemeni journalist who interviewed two German-speaking hotel owners in Namibia. The three spoke English, because it was their only common language.

My opera-and-pasta Italian wasn’t equal to the original, though I knew that the phrase “Gravamente insufficiente” was bad news. Luckily, the newspaper website includes an English translation of the tale, explaining that the “gobbet” of text lifted from the Web came to the attention of Jean Woodhouse, an English teacher in Italy, and propelled her into high dudgeon. "If the examiner had been one of my pupils I would have failed him or her," Woodhouse told Corriere della Sera. "Frankly the text should have been thrown in the wastepaper basket."

A retired professor in Venice chimed in too, telling the Times of London that the text was "a kind of pseudo-English, or what was once called pidgin English. Even the average waiter in Venice speaks English more correctly than this."

Well, I’ve seen the text -- rather wildly marked up by Woodhouse -- and all I can say is, Really?

Here’s a bit of the "pidgin English":

FULL ENTRY

From an Associated Press story so piquantly sauced with its own commentary that mine would be superfluous:

HOUMA, La. -- As an agency created in response to the long suppression of French in state schools turned 40, a south Louisiana school board member suggested that only English should be allowed in graduation speeches.

Rickie Pitre (pronounced "PEE-tree") is among six people with French surnames on the nine-member school board in Terrebonne Parish, where the county's name is French for "Good Earth" and elders of the local Native American tribe speak French as their first language.

His proposal was made after co-valedictorians and cousins Hue and Cindy Vo, whose parents emigrated from Vietnam, gave parts of their commencement speeches in Vietnamese during Ellender High School's graduation ceremony.

Cindy Vo translated her single sentence in Vietnamese, telling her classmates it was a command to always be your own person. Hue Vo spoke a bit longer in her parents' language, without translation, said board president Clark Bonvillain and schools superintendent Ed Richard.

"I don't like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English," Pitre said during a recent committee meeting.

But Richard -- pronounced "REE-shard" -- is dubious. "I did advise them that I didn't think they needed to go there," he said. "But I'm only a superintendent, not a board member."

. . .

As late as the 1950s, children who spoke French in school were routinely punished. "It seems like these issues will never go away," said Warren Perrin, president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, which is turning 40 this year.

FULL ENTRY

I came across this ad for a Fifth Avenue jewelry store in the New York Times last month, when The Word blog was still dormant, so I sent a note about it to Nancy Friedman, who blogs about words, naming, and branding at Fritinancy.

But I see it’s a recurring ad, this delightful mashup of English royal history, so now that the blog has been revived, I thought I’d share it with my own readers. Here’s the comment that I e-mailed and Nancy published:

The headline is "My Kingdom for your Old Jewelry," from, of course, Shakespeare's libellous* play about the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III. The picture is a portrait of Henry (Tudor) VIII, son of the Henry whose rebellion killed off Richard and his line. The name of the store is Windsor Jewelers Inc.-- and though Windsor is old, it wasn't a royal name till the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha royals decided WWI was a good reason for the name change.

Perhaps I was sensitive to this because I [had] just finished reading Josephine Tey's classic pro-Richard III mystery, "The Daughter of Time." But I would think many a Shakespeare fan would notice the odd juxtaposition. Or am I too optimistic?

*I should have spelled this "libelous" – I must have been temporarily seduced by the British spellings in “Daughter of Time.”

"It’s like fingernails on a blackboard" is probably the peevologist’s favorite description of how a usage fumble affects his or her nervous system. But according to a report in today’s New York Times, "nails on a blackboard" ranks only 16th on the list of Noises Humans Hate.

So if you really, really recoil at "me and him went fishing," you should say it’s like listening to someone upchuck. Yes, the most unpleasant noise, according to thousands of online voters, was the sound of someone (else) vomiting.

The survey is still online, but it’s not entirely satisfying; you may get the same sample three times (there are 30-plus noises, randomly shuffled). I heard a coughing fit that sounded just like me, a couple of pollen-drenched weeks ago, and a reasonable impression of my husband’s snore, but I never did get to the barfing. And while almost any noise, repeated at night, could keep a person awake and homicidal, few of these were truly horripilating.

Anyway, as I waited for the scraping fingernails to turn up, I began to wonder: Do they really make a horrible sound on a blackboard? I tried it myself, and I couldn’t raise a squeak. On the other hand, chalk on a blackboard -- or charcoal on drawing paper -- can produce a shriek that makes my teeth twang like banjo strings.

No usage mistake has ever done that to me. But some people think it’s possible. In their book "Forbidden Words" (2006), linguists Kate Burridge and Keith Allan speculated[*] that grammar errors might have measurable physiological effects on certain people, just as obscenities do. One day perhaps they’ll assemble a group of sticklers, wire them up, and see whether split infinitives really do make them sweat.

Till then, only you will know whether your "fingernails on a blackboard" comparison is hyperbole or plain physiological truth.

FULL ENTRY

When I was writing today’s column on “if” and “whether,” I e-mailed Grammar Girl -- Mignon Fogarty, in real life -- to ask about the characters she uses to illustrate her usage examples: Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday, etc.

As someone with a unisex name, I try to be careful when I identify others in the same condition, even if they are fictional, so I wanted to know: Are they male, female, neuter? And what is Squiggly, anyway?

She answered:

Squiggly and Aardvark are my own characters. Both are male. Aardvark is a somewhat grumpy blue aardvark, and Squiggly is somewhat bumbling yellow snail. They are friends and go on adventures together. (They are sometimes joined by Sir Fragalot, a tall knight who likes to shout sentence fragments.)

So now we know. Grammar Girl is best known as a podcaster, but you can also read her episodes online, complete with footnotes and comments; the post on “if/whether” that inspired today's Word column is here.

In today’s edition of his weekly (free) newsletter, World Wide Words (subscribe here), Michael Quinion puts his foot down on the alternate/alternative debate:

ALTERNATE Several readers queried my phrase "Harry Turtledove's
alternate history.” No, they cried, it should be "alternative."
"Alternate history," for an SF story which takes place in a world
in which history has taken a different course, is first recorded in
1957 and is older than the other form by 20 years. It was coined in
the U.S., in which "alternate" has taken over much of the territory
of "alternative" during the past 50 years. It is mostly the British
who prefer "alternative history," though even here -- as you will
note from my using it -- the other form is often used because of US
influence. Let us not, please not, argue the relative merits of the
two words.

The story on White Lily flour, a Southern favorite, that ran in the New York Times’s Wednesday Food section was one of the top 10 e-mailed pieces, and it more than earned that flurry of forwarding. Author Shaila Dewan separated the (soft red winter) wheat from the chaff, detail-wise, and really got down to the nitty-gritty -- or, in this case, the silky-downy -- of her subject:

Underneath the husk of a wheat kernel, a layer of bran encloses the germ and a white substance called endosperm. White Lily is a patent flour, meaning it uses only the heart of the endosperm, the purest part.

White Lily is bleached with chlorine, a process that not only whitens the flour but weakens the proteins. Chlorination alters the starch particles to make batters more viscous, and thus less likely to fall. It loosens the strict balance of starch, liquid, fat and sugar that baking requires to allow for higher proportions of sugar -- thus, sweeter cakes.

But when I reached the end, I forwarded the story to a fellow Ohio native, asking “Can you spot the geographical labeling bias?”

The news here is that White Lily’s Knoxville mill, source of the flour for 125 years, is closing because the newish owner, J.M. Smucker, is moving the milling elsewhere -- to “two plants in the Midwest.” Ah, yes, the Midwest, that vast uncharted territory. Anywhere in particular?

Sure, it’s only natural that a story datelined “Knoxville” would focus on that city. But to identify the new home of White Lily as only “the Midwest” seems a bit dismissive -- kind of like Saul Steinberg’s “View of the World from 9th Avenue” triangulated with the Tennessee perspective.

The Midwest (like the South) is a big region, with debatable borders; the language blogger Wishydig polled readers on which states to include, and generated this map from the results:

Where in the world is the Midwest? Wishydig's reader poll results

But (also like the South), it’s far from homogeneous.

In any case, the geographical fact is that the new White Lily -- taste-tested for the article -- is being milled in Toledo, Ohio. (Smucker’s is based in Orrville, Ohio.) From Knoxville to Toledo is essentially a straight shot north on I-75 for 450 miles -- the distance from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Knoxville is sorry to lose the flower of baking flours: fair enough. But White Lily isn’t leaving for a distant, unknown galaxy. There is a there there, just a tankful or two up the Interstate.

Readers with longish memories will know -- and others have been reminded by Josh Glenn of Brainiac, the other Ideas section blog -- that there were some posts about language back in the day, before we made Brainiac a one-person show last September. Well, The Word blog now has its own space, and will be ready for visitors in a few days. Come back soon!