“Even as I draw my pay for teaching grammar … `to bird’ is a regular part of my vocabulary,” Cashwell confesses in the opening pages of his book “The Verb `To Bird’: Sightings of an Avid Birder” (Paul Dry Books, $22.95).

Cashwell, who lives in rural Virginia, apologizes for this apparent impropriety but explains that “bird-watching” won’t do.

“The term suggests that we . . . sit passively and stare at [birds],” he writes. “In reality, those who bird pursue birds, observing them, memorizing their names, learning their field marks and calls, chasing them over hill and dale . . . . I doubt that clock-watchers act this way around clocks.”

The verb “to bird” is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1576, but then it referred to hunting and trapping birds. Only within the past two decades, Cashwell says, has “birding” begun to replace “bird-watching.”

Cashwell also considers the case of the cardinal bird, skeptical of the story that it was named for the resemblance of its red feathers to the robes of Catholic cardinals.

“It seemed a stretch to me that in the Southeastern portion of the country [where the bird is most prevalent], a heavily Protestant area, people would see a red bird and the first thing they think of is a high-ranking member of the Vatican,” Cashwell said in a phone interview. “I found out that it was the explorers, not the Protestants, who had done the naming, and they were from Catholic nations or were Catholic themselves.”

Other than his reflections on bird and cardinal, Cashwell writes more about the practice than the vocabulary of birding. But birding has, in fact, inspired or appropriated a whole flock of words, as you can see at the online version of Peter Weaver’s Birdwatcher’s Dictionary (www.birdcare.com/bin/searchdict). Among Weaver’s entries:

Anvil: A hard surface a bird uses to smash the shells of snails or clams to obtain the soft insides. According to legend, as recorded by the 1st Century Roman Historian Pliny the Elder, the Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head, mistaking its bald surface for a stone.

Billing: This has nothing to do with accounting. Billing is the practice of touching bills in an affectionate way during courtship, and is often observed in pigeons. A British variant is nebbing.

Cain and Abel situation: A colloquial term for siblicide, or the killing of one sibling by another (usually the younger sibling is the victim, as in the biblical story of Cain and Abel). “It probably showed up in a paper somewhere, and someone decided to get cute,” said Jeff Brawn, associate professor of animal biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and treasurer of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Guano: A Spanish word for a pile of droppings, such as what accumulates under a roost. Bat guano is sold as fertilizer.

LBJ: Not the nation’s 36th president, but a little brown job—a bird that alights and then flies away too quickly to be described in any detail.

Lek: an assembly of birds in which males strut and dance in hope of attracting a mate. The word, which can be used as a verb or noun, apparently comes from the Swedish word leka, meaning to play. “It’s a great Scrabble word,” Cashwell said. “I’ve been challenged about that one a couple of times.”

Life list: The list of all the bird species a birder has seen in her lifetime. An addition to the list is called a lifer. Someone who earnestly seeks to add to her life list is called a lister (see “twitcher” below).

Mobbing: The harassment or attack of a larger bird by a gang of smaller ones. “This is something I’ve observed fairly frequently,” Cashwell said. “I’ve seen a handful of swallows chasing a hawk. It was like a small Apache attack helicopter attacking a bomber.”

Pen: a female swan. A male swan is a cob. “There are literally scores of terms for the males and females of individual animals,” Cashwell said. A male duck, for example, is called a drake, the female a hen.

Pish: the approximate sound a birder produces through pursed lips in an attempt to draw a bird closer. “It sounds strange, but it really works,” Cashwell said. “You can get a bird to fly out of the brush or down from the higher branches of a tree by saying `pish’ toward it.”

Twitcher: Someone who goes to great lengths to spot a certain species. Weaver suggests the name refers to the nervous anticipation of a birder on the lookout for a new addition to his life list. “Twitchers will drive great distances to see a rare bird in a particular area that may have blown in because of a storm or gotten lost,” Cashwell said.

Yaffle: the common name for the European green woodpecker, named for its laughing call.

The process is called “accent neutralization.” But in reality, trainers are out to transform, not just tweak, the speech of trainees facing the tricky task of dealing with often grouchy people demanding customer assistance.

The challenge is to slow the clipped Indian speech cadence and tackle the pronunciation of what seem like unnatural sounds to the trainees in order to be understood by North American and British customers. Although the Indian trainees typically speak English as either a native or a second language, English has a markedly different sound on different continents. Trainers in Bangalore say some Western pronunciation doesn’t come naturally to the people in their classes.

“Some Indian trainees take a little more time to grasp the sounds `v,’ `w,’ `ei,’ `th’ and `aw,’” Nina Nair, general manager of learning and development for the call center service 24/7 Customer, wrote by e-mail from Bangalore.

“[We] practice with words containing these sounds: wine, vine, vet, wet, vale, wail. We also have the students make up paragraphs using words with these sounds.”

Nair has trained more than 1,000 Indian call center workers. She teaches 20 people at a time in classes that last about two weeks, working on the phonetics, intonation and rhythm of American and British accents (other trainers handle the Canadian accent).

For examples of American speech, Nair says she shows her classes clips of TV shows such as “Friends” and movies such as “Pretty Woman,” “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Men In Black.”

“Intonation is taught [by] speaking out sentences with stress on different parts of speech,” Nair wrote. “`She likes them’ is spoken as `She laiks’em,’ with the stress on the verb `likes.’ `Can’t you?’ is spoken as `Canchyu’?”

These and other vocal exercises can become tongue-twisters in the mouths of Indians unfamiliar with Western speech. In “The Other Side of Outsourcing,” a documentary hosted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on the Discovery Channel last month, call center trainees were shown struggling with the R’s and T’s in a reading exercise that began, “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water.”

“Remember the first day I told you that the Americans flat the `ta’ sound?” the instructor asked the class. “It sounds like an almost `da’ sound. They do not keep it crisp and clear like the British. … They would say, `Insert a quarder in the meder,’ or `Beddy bought a bit of bedder budder.’”

“When we talk to an American over the phone, that’s when we open our mouths a little wider, like the Americans do,” one call center supervisor told Friedman.

The training may not be enough, however, to fool Americans into thinking their customer service calls are being picked up in Indiana instead of India. Internet message boards are beginning to register complaints from customers frustrated with overseas call centers.

“While the reps were polite, they simply would not speak clear enough English to be understood and could not seem to understand my simple questions!” wrote one computer customer at Silicon.com. “Sure, there are bad employees in the U.S. also, but they can at least be understood when they speak and can understand what you’re saying.”

In response, 24/7 spokesman Shimonti Sikdar said, “If you look at the percentage of such complaints, it is less than 1 percent of the total calls. Rather than taking extra time to train the agents at the onset, it makes sense to give them continued education in accent and communication to maintain the call quality at all times.”

Endings

• Nearly three years after moving to Italy, Rebecca Helm-Ropelato isn’t
  just learning Italian; she’s learning Italian idioms.”Where we say, `you’re pulling my leg,’ the Italians say, `you’re pulling my nose,’” Helm-Ropelato wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor.
  “Instead of `we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ the Italians admonish `not
  to bandage one’s head before breaking it.’ Italians don’t say `it’s raining
  cats and dogs’; they say, `it’s raining as if God sent it.’

  Helm-Ropelato says her linguistic progress is “piano, piano”—an Italian
  expression for “slowly, step by step.”

• Roger Kimball nipped ambiguity in the bud in an essay earlier this
  year in The National Interest: “By `intellectual,’ I do not mean `bookish’; I do
  not mean `intelligent,’” Kimball wrote. “I mean characterized by a certain lofty
  moralism—smug, progressive, abstract, activist.”
• Receptionists—make that customer service representatives—keep
  getting promoted, if their titles are any indication. Callers seeking news
  of people admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital are asked to hold for “the
  next patient access representative.”

Researchers in Germany spotted Rico on a TV game show and brought him in for tests. What they found, the journal Science reported last month, was that the brilliant border collie seemed to recognize more than 200 German words. That kind of vocabulary was previously thought to be attainable only by children and specially trained animals such as apes and dolphins.

Asked by his German owners to retrieve a certain toy from the next room—such as a stuffed panda bear or banana—Rico scrounged around in a bin of toys and returned with the correct item 37 out of 40 times. When his owner asked for a toy Rico had never heard of, the 9-year-old border collie knew enough to retrieve the one item in the bin whose name he didn’t know.

This apparent ability to learn words, which scientists call “fast mapping,” was “comparable to toddlers,” the study said.

Rico’s owner stayed in an adjacent room during the tests, to ensure the dog was no Clever Hans—the horse who gained attention at the turn of the 20th Century for supposedly answering math questions. It was later learned the horse was just responding to subtle gestures from his owner.

Since Rico was on his own when retrieving the toys, his feat was heralded by scientists as a breakthrough for animal recognition of language. “The study suggests to scientists that the ability to understand sounds is not necessarily related to the ability to speak, and that some aspects of speech comprehension evolved earlier than, and independent from, of human speech,” wrote Daniel Kane at the Web site of The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But while there was no question that Rico’s skills were remarkable, the study did reignite a contentious debate among linguists about whether animals can actually understand language. Rico can fetch different toys, but does he understand what his owner is saying?

No way, fumed Geoffrey Pullum, author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Nobody doubts that mammals are capable of associating large numbers of aural stimuli with particular behavioral responses,” Pullum wrote at www.languagelog.org. “It’s the confusion of that with `understanding language’ that drives me nuts.”

Pullum was especially displeased with the Associated Press headline, “Research Shows Dogs Understand Language.”

“It is my belief that no dog ever actually understands anything, in the special sense of recognizing that it has been told something that might be either true or false, or understanding the meaning of something . . . or even dimly appreciating that there is such as thing as meaning,” Pullum wrote in an e-mail interview. “With dogs, despite the high degree of sensitivity to humans’ social cues, it’s all tied to immediate behavior, like Rico’s fetching behavior.”

In a 1987 study of Kanzi the bonobo, another gifted animal with a vast vocabulary, researchers wrote, “Our view is that Kanzi’s behaviors are more like the use of tools than the human use of language. Tools are the instruments by which we attain certain outcomes. They are not symbols.”

Kanzi, they said, “does not know that lexigrams [words and pictures] represent, symbolize, or name objects and events; rather, he knows how to use them in order to effect desired outcomes.”

In a commentary in Science on the Rico study, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom voiced the same cautions. Although the study “seems to vindicate” dog owners who “boast about the communicative and social abilities of their pets,” Bloom wrote, Rico “learns only through a specific fetching game.” Unlike children, who understand that words “refer to categories and individuals,” Bloom said, in Rico’s brain, there may be no difference between “sock” and “fetch the sock.”

For now, Bloom concluded, “It is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not.”

Endings

Scandals not only reveal politicians’ bad behavior; they lead to leaders’ lamest language. When Connecticut Gov. John Rowland announced his resignation last month in the face of an impeachment inquiry and a federal corruption investigation, he stated, “I acknowledge that my poor judgment has brought us here.” Meanwhile, asked why he told Illinois Republican leaders that he didn’t think his divorce file would be damaging, U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan told reporters, “I don’t think the phrase `I don’t think so’ is misleading.”

“Wow! That was back in the day,” her guest remarked.

“That was so back in the day it’s not even funny,” O’Brien replied. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Which “day” we are talking about is not always clear, but there has been a lot of going back to it lately.

This month, all in the same week, Auto Week wrote that the new Pontiac GTO “has standard features galore and build quality unheard of back in the day.” Fortune, in an article about airlines, observed, “Back in the day, bad service was the trade-off for low prices [before higher quality discount airlines emerged].” Newsweek said Slash, the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses now strumming with the band Velvet Revolver, “looks exactly as he did back in the day.”

A Nexis search for “back in the day” returns more than 3,500 results for the first five months of this year, compared with about 2,000 for the same period in the year 2000 (although Nexis does not distinguish between “the day” and “those days”).

The Google search engine yields more than a quarter of a million results for “back in the day,” five times as many as “back in those days” and 10 times as many as “back in my day.”

The origins of “back in the day” are obscure, but the consensus among linguists and word watchers participating in The American Dialect Society’s e-mail discussions seems to be that “back in the day” arose from hip-hop music circa the 1980s.

“I teach at Hampton [Va.] University, an historically black college,” writes linguist Margaret Lee in an interview by e-mail. “I remember my students using `back in the day’ as early as 1984 to refer to the relatively recent past, but usually a time before they were born. Before that, I remember it being used occasionally by hip-hop artists in TV interviews in the early 1980′s.”

“I don’t know that it originated in African-American English or hip-hop speech, but it has certainly gotten currency in those discourse communities,” says Drew Danielson, an administrative assistant at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in an interview by e-mail.

Danielson cites hip-hop songs titled “Back In The Day” by Young MC and Ahmad in the early 1990s. Recent albums by artists Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot have tracks called “Back in the Day.” Newsday wrote this month that the new Beastie Boys album features “the same kind of East Coast beats that Run-DMC and The Sugarhill Gang would have busted out back in the day.”

A movie called “Back in the Day,” starring rapper Ja Rule, is scheduled to open later this year.

As the phrase is currently used, “back in the day” seems to have two basic meanings: “long ago” and “was it really that long ago?”

For the first sense, consider O’Brien and her lavender Citroen. She was really saying, “That was so long ago it’s not even funny.” Here, “the day” serves a shortened form of “the days of my youth” or “the days when lavender was in style.”

“The day” can also mean “heyday,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “the period of greatest popularity, success or power; prime.”

Former Detroit Pistons player Rick Mahorn compared the crowds that cheered his championship team in the late 1980s to those who followed this year’s victorious Pistons. “I remember the crowd being just as loud, just as vocal, back in the day,” he told the Detroit News in a June 15 story.

One quirk of context: when someone uses “back in the day,” it’s generally a sign of pleasant nostalgia for days past. If you hear “back in my day,” get ready for a pronouncement on modern moral decline: “Back in my day, kids respected their elders” carries an overtone very different from “kids respected their elders back in the day.”

Sometimes “the day” isn’t really so long ago: “Compared to what it was like to start your own Web page back in the day, starting a blog is a breeze,” wrote the Macon [Ga.] Telegraph earlier this year in an article about the fast-changing Internet.

Younger generations may be latching onto the catchphrase as a rite of passage, says James Vanden Bosch, English professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

“I hear it only from twentysomethings,” he says. “It strikes me that this is early evidence of these youngsters’ awareness that they, too, are growing old, and suddenly their quite recent past — 7 or 8 years ago — constitutes a significant period of time and development.”

“It’s a way,” he adds, “of claiming to be old enough to have an interesting past already.”

The meeting is conducted almost entirely in Esperanto, but the non-Esperantist visitor can pick out words here and there: “ne” for “no,” “dankon” for “thank you,” “estas” for “is,” and “unu” for “one.”

The headings on the membership roster sheet speak for themselves: “telefonnumero” for “telephone number,” “urbo” for “city,” and “Cxikago” for “Chicago.”

The 12 people at this meeting are preserving the dream of Polish physician Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, who in 1887 published a brochure titled “Lingvo Internacia” (“International Language”) under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto (“one who hopes”), outlining the basics of his invented language. If everyone could learn Esperanto as a second language, Zamenhof believed, different cultures could maintain their own identities and still communicate with each other.

Zamenhof designed Esperanto to be simple to learn, consistent in structure, and clear in meaning. He used root words derived from Latin, English and French, among other languages.

According to Esperanto educational materials, students can expect to take about a year to become fluent in Esperanto—a fraction of the time it takes to master other languages. There are only 16 rules of grammar (compared with the book-length grammar guides for English) and no silent letters or irregular spellings. All singular nouns end in “o,” plural nouns in “j,” verbs in “i,” adjectives in “a” and adverbs in “e.”

The vowel endings give Esperanto an elegant sound, evoking Italian or Spanish.

As a would-be world language, Esperanto’s advantage is also its disadvantage. Because it has no nation of native speakers, Esperanto is culturally neutral and non-threatening. But its nomad status also means there has never been much political push for anyone to adopt it.

Still, Esperanto has a core following of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, “possibly millions,” who have some degree of proficiency in the language, according to the Netherlands-based Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), which lists members in more than 100 countries.

Six Nobel Prize winners spoke the language, and everyone from Leo Tolstoy to Eleanor Roosevelt to Robert F. Kennedy has endorsed using Esperanto as a global second language.

So have six popes; the Vatican makes its radio broadcasts available in Esperanto. Hundreds of people worldwide register for free Esperanto lessons at www.lernu.net.

Most members of the Esperanto Society of Chicago (www.esperanto-chicago.org), including natives of Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and the Ukraine, are advanced or fluent in Esperanto.

President Bill Mania opens this meeting by reading a report he wrote in Esperanto about attending a conference of Esperantists in “Sankta-Luiso,” or St. Louis, with his daughter Sarah, 9, whom he is teaching Esperanto.

Mania then suggests a group exercise: translate a short story by Guyanese author Pauline Melville into Esperanto, one page per person. Les Kordylewski, who learned Esperanto in his native Poland, gets a laugh when he says he would prefer to be assigned the “lasta pagxo”—the last page, which has only three lines.

Dr. Gertrude Novak, an Austrian native and a delegate to the UEA, closes the meeting with the report of a phone call she received earlier that day from a man in Congo who conducted the conversation in Esperanto—a reminder of how useful a universal language can be.

Like the majority of Esperantists, members of the Chicago society are idealistic but not delusional: They like the spirit of international goodwill that enlivens Esperanto but are not under the impression it is about to become a major world language.

“Esperantists tend to be well-read, environmentally aware, politically involved,” says Mania. “There’s a geekiness to it,” adds Robert Stalzer.

Marc Shafroth drove down from Madison, Wis., for the opportunity to converse in the language with other enthusiasts.

“There are four parts to a language: speaking, hearing, reading and writing,” he says. “With Esperanto, you can do all of them on your own except speaking. There’s no place to speak it except here. That’s the benefit of this.”

The Chicago club is mourning the loss of one especially tireless proponent of Esperanto, Kent Jones, a longtime member who died in February. A civil engineer, Jones promoted Esperanto as a way to reduce airline accidents involving pilots and control tower operators for whom English was a second language.

He also believed teaching Esperanto in schools would provide students with an effective building block.

“The formal study of English requires preparation . . . in the form of a model language—one without the snaggle-toothed problems of English,” he wrote in a 1996 letter to the Tribune.

“Esperanto should precede the formal study of English, because Esperanto can prepare the mind for it.”

“You don’t have spelling bees, do you?” he asked her.

He had to explain what they were.

“She kind of laughed and said, ‘No, we wouldn’t have that,’” Simpson recalls. “Then she paused and said, `But I know why you have them.’”

Korean has a simple correspondence between spelling and sounds. English, with its many foreign influences and irregularities, does not.

“Spelling bees are largely an American phenomenon, something that is unique to the English language,” said Paige Kimble, 1981 champion and director of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. “We are simply not aware of any long-standing spelling bee programs in other languages.”

Indeed, the major spelling bees that do exist around the world—everywhere from Mexico to Japan to Saudi Arabia—use English words, Kimble said.

“In almost every other language, spelling is phonetic. There are very few rules, and once you know those rules, spelling is straightforward,” Kimble said. “English is this beautiful mess of words collected over centuries from languages all over the world. To become good spellers, English speakers have to learn a little bit about these languages and their patterns.”

Simpson, who chairs the psychology department at Kansas, has devised a way to study how the brain connects spelling to pronunciation. “There are two ways of getting to the pronunciation of a word,” Simpson says. “One is to look the whole word up in your mental dictionary. The other way is to translate the letters into sounds and basically construct the pronunciation.”

He has concluded that the more common the word, the more people tend to use the whole-word—or “lexical”—method to pronounce it. The rarer the word, the more people rely on the partial-word or “sub-lexical” method, mentally sounding it out.

Simpson found that English speakers take longer to react to rare words than Korean speakers react to rare Korean words. English speakers, he concludes, are fumbling around for the whole word; Korean speakers save time by using phonetics and sounding the word out.

Because their spelling rules are more consistent, Koreans are more likely to use them to pronounce a word, Simpson says.

“The degree to which fluent adult readers seem to be using their knowledge of the sound system varies among languages,” Simpson said. “When the spelling of a word is a more reliable cue to how it can be pronounced, a reader might use that information more.”

Not only does Korean have a more consistent sound system, but its alphabet actually provides visual clues to how to produce a sound, Simpson said.

“Look at our letters N, D and T. Although their sounds are related—if you feel where your tongue is, you’ll see it’s in the same place for all of them—the letters don’t look at all similar,” Simpson said. “In Korean, sounds that are related are represented by letters that are visually similar to each other.”

In a spelling bee, whole-word and partial-word recognition may both come into play, Simpson said. Contestants may recognize an entire word from the word lists they study beforehand, or they may try to take it syllable by syllable or ask for the word’s language of origin, which the rules allow, in hopes of distinguishing between, say “-us” and “-ous.”

Before the National Spelling Bee crowns its 78th champion, contestants may lament English’s opaque orthography when asked to spell words such as “euonym” or “succedaneum” (two winning words in recent years). But Simpson said we shouldn’t necessarily disparage English spelling for its complexity.

“English starts taking a bad rap after a while,” he said. “There are some characteristics of English spelling that suit it very well. For example, were we to start our spelling from scratch, we would not spell sign, S-I-G-N. However, if we change it, then the connection between the words sign and signature would be lost.”

In a brand name’s infancy, however, the thought of gaining this kind of cultural currency is an inspiration to professional namers, says Alex Frankel in his new book “Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business” (Crown, $24.95).

Namers long to launch their creations into the vernacular—casual use around water coolers and in chat rooms. The lawyers can worry about the rest.

Frankel’s book, like a tour of a sausage factory or the U.S. Capitol, shows readers places they’ve never seen to explain processes of which some would rather remain unaware.

He describes how names are born—usually in magic marker on whiteboards, alongside myriad other suggestions—and how a select few make it big, sometimes bigger than the name of the company itself.

The trick for corporations is to contrive a word that doesn’t sound like a corporate contrivance. The more corporate it sounds, the greater the risk of a backlash against brand names among consumers.

Frankel, a journalist who started his own short-lived naming firm in Silicon Valley, chose five names to tell his story: Accenture, BlackBerry, Cayenne, e-business and Viagra.

Along the way, he introduces little-known but hugely influential naming firms such as Lexicon Branding in San Francisco—which coined Dasani, Febreze, Pentium, PowerBook and Zima, among hundreds of others—and Wood Worldwide in Manhattan, which has christened many best-selling drugs, including Paxil, Viagra and Zocor.

It was Lexicon that came up with the name BlackBerry for a hand-held computer made by its client, Research In Motion (RIM). With the help of linguistics consultants, it analyzed possible names’ semantics (meaning), phonetics (sound) and something namers call “sound symbolism.”

For the RIM device, Lexicon was seeking a name that would communicate the ideas ‘easy access’ and ‘quick response.’ One namer thought the hand-held communicator looked sort of like a strawberry, its tiny keys resembling the seeds on a berry’s surface. But he thought the word “blackberry” sounded better.

Lexicon brought in a linguistics professor to examine why.

“Black,” he noted, has hard and quick consonants that move the word along; “straw” begins with the sluggish hiss of the “S” and ends with a “w,” slowing the speaker down.

Dubbing the device “BlackBerry” also benefited from alliteration and symmetry—two five-letter parts, each beginning with a capital “B” (thanks to “intercapping,” or capitalizing a letter in the middle of a word).

RIM credits the name for BlackBerry’s success; it has sold millions, including 435 to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Viagra was even more of a verbal phenomenon, landing in the Oxford English Dictionary just three years after the product was launched in 1998.

The drug itself—sildenafil citrate—was patented by Pfizer in 1991 as a heart treatment. When researchers noticed the drug offered other benefits, Pfizer turned to Wood Worldwide for a name. Wood offered “Viagra,” noting the aptness of the word’s sounds for the nature of the drug’s remedy—”Vi” for virility or vigor, “agra,” meaning “claim” or “take” and suggesting the energy of “aggression” and the fertility of “agriculture.”

Seeing the birth of brand names may lead readers to look at the ever-growing place of brands in their own lives and speech, Frankel said in an interview by telephone.

“Part of my hope is that the reader would come away from this book and look at the world in a slightly different way,” he said.

“They would see their own vocabulary filled with brand names and wonder if that’s good or bad.”

As timely as the tagline is in this era of Enron/Tyco corporate scandal, it raises one question: What exactly is a values-based leader?

“Most business schools do an effective job educating students about the technical aspects of business—debits, credits, accounting, supply and demand curves, and so on,” said Robert Parkinson Jr., dean of Loyola’s Graduate School of Business and former president of Abbott Laboratories.

“I’m not sure if business schools do as effective a job of training leaders in the broader context of ethical and socially responsible behavior.”

To describe this goal, Loyola, a Jesuit university, chose “values-based leaders” over “responsible leaders”—which was considered too broad—and “ethical leaders”—too narrow—Parkinson said. The school is counting on common interpretations of the word “values” to get the message across.

“There’s a moral undertone to `values-based leadership,’” says word watcher Paul McFedries, author of “Word Spy” and editor of WordSpy.com. “We’re seeing ‘values’ morphing into the general idea of moral values, probably because people see it as a short form of `family values.’”

Some lexicographers might argue that everyone is “values-based.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “value” as “a principle, standard or quality considered worthwhile or desirable.” But what people consider desirable can be good or bad.

“What’s important to one person could be many things, not necessarily positive things,” McFedries said. “A business might value the bottom line. If that’s what you value, then the means to get to that end are not necessarily important as long as you reach the thing you value: maximum profit for the shareholder.”

Parkinson said he considered the ambiguity of the word “values,” citing a commencement address by columnist George Will at Lafayette College in 2000. In that speech, Will contended that when people say “values,” they often mean “virtues.” Webster defines “virtue” as “conformity to a standard of right . . . a particular moral excellence.”

But Parkinson didn’t wish to split lexical hairs on his school’s billboards and said using “virtuous” would be “a little self-righteous.”

“I didn’t want the tagline to be `virtuous leaders,’” he said. “The word ‘values’ is more in line with business terminology. . . . Implicit in ‘values’ is good values, not bad. If we were to do market research on this, I would be shocked if less than 99 percent of respondents didn’t associate something positive with that.”

Talk of “values” is hardly restricted to the world of business. With the election season under way, “`moral values’ is going to be on everyone’s lips,” McFedries said.

So will the phrase “family values” — it’s hard to locate a candidate who says he or she doesn’t value family life.

“Values” is also unavoidable in sports, though it can serve as a source of irony. This month’s telecast of The Masters golf championship included a public service spot for First Tee, a non-profit organization that introduces golf to youth. In the spot, a mother reported that golf is “teaching my daughter important values.”

But at Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts The Masters, those values do not include welcoming female golfers as members. To fend off protests aimed at advertisers over that policy, CBS and Augusta National made this the second year in a row the tournament was commercial-free save for that First Tee spot and its message about “values.”

Endings

• Activists succeeded earlier this month in blocking Wal-Mart’s
  expansion into Inglewood, Calif., despite some ambiguous campaign buttons.
  The
  buttons bore the words “Stop Wal-Mart!” underneath a red circle with a
  slash
  through it, literally urging readers to oppose efforts to stop Wal-Mart .
  . .
• Monthly visitation to Congaree Swamp National Monument near Columbia,S.C.,
  has
  more than doubled since the site dropped “Swamp,” The New York Times
  reports.Last November, President Bush authorized changing the park’s name to
  Congaree
  National Park. . . .
• “Wardrobe malfunction” was the top “HollyWord” in
  terms
  of its impact on the English language over the last 12 months, according
  to
  the word-tracking Web site Global Language Monitor (languagemonitor.com).

“I think the role of the stickler these days has dwindled to that of enraged observer,” she said in an interview. “Sticklers of my sort have no authority!”

Truss has tried to change that with her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” which became an unexpected best seller in Britain and will be released in North America by Gotham Books.

“Sticklers, unite!” is her book’s rallying cry. “Some of us were born to be punctuation vigilantes,” she writes but adds that everyone can “unleash your Inner Stickler.”

Do you doubt the importance of punctuation? Consider the example Truss takes from a popular e-mail that has been widely forwarded: With just a few strokes of a pen or keyboard, the statement “A woman, without her man, is nothing” becomes “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” Or take Truss’ title, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” Without the comma, the book’s back cover explains, the phrase describes a panda’s diet. With the comma, it reports armed assault in a deli.

“Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart,” Truss writes. “The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it, there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.”

Truss samples some popular analogies about punctuation. Punctuation marks are the stitches of language that hold it together, or the traffic signals that tell us where to go.

Punctuation is also like good manners. “Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves,” Truss writes. “It is no accident that the word `punctilious’ (`attentive to formality or etiquette’) comes from the same original root word as punctuation.”

Violation of this etiquette can summon an alarming amount of rage in sticklers. When Truss says that committing the cardinal sin of writing “it’s” as a possessive is cause for the offender “to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave,” it is reassuring to see that the publisher lists the book in the unique category of “reference/humour.”

Despite the fierceness of her defense, Truss acknowledges that punctuation is a relatively recent invention. For much of the history of writing, Truss says, punctuation was spare; in plays or texts to be read aloud, a few rudimentary marks were inserted to tell actors or readers where to breathe. With the rise of printing came the need for a standard system of marks.

Truss celebrates the 15th Century printer Aldus Manutius, who is generally credited with developing the modern comma and semicolon and inaugurating the period.

Truss takes the major punctuation marks one by one (she spends a chapter each on the comma, the apostrophe and the hyphen), listing rules of usage and adding examples and anecdotes. Her sources vary, from the 16th Century printer who tried to introduce the reverse question mark for rhetorical questions, to Virginia Woolf, who used five semicolons in one sentence in “Mrs. Dalloway,” to the British child who defended putting everything he wrote in quotation marks, since, after all, “it’s all me talking.”

Despite Truss’ pledge to take a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation, she allows for some subjectivity, respecting linguist G.V. Carey’s rule that punctuation proceed “two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste.”

Truss’ own British spellings and punctuation style (such as putting a closing quotation mark before the period rather than after it) call attention to the elasticity of punctuation standards. Gotham Books decided not to revise the book according to American spelling and style.

“We were so taken with the book as it was, so much of the wit and charm of it was very British,” said William Shinker, Gotham’s senior vice president and publisher. “If you Americanize it, it would just have ruined the tone of the book.”

While punctuation is ever evolving, the Internet and instant messaging have made punctuation appreciation an urgent cause, Truss said in an interview.

“People are writing much, much more than they used to do, and writing publicly,” she said. “So much editing used to go on that’s been thrown away. People write directly into the medium.” As a result, she said, “language is losing a lot of its charm, a lot of its subtlety, a lot of its meaning.”

With the first release of the American National Corpus, an annotated body of over 10 million words, linguists can hunt like never before.

“Up until now, linguists were kind of like Victorian bug hunters,” says Erin McKean, the Chicago-based senior editor of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press and board member of the American National Corpus. “We’d go out with our nets and we’d catch some butterflies and we’d chloroform them and pin them to cards and put them in a drawer.”

“But now, when people are really studying an ecosystem—and English is like an ecosystem—what they do is, they take a representative square area and report everything that’s there: every bug, every plant, every leaf,” she said.
“And now with the corpus, we can do that for English.”

If the dictionary is like the drawer with bugs on cards, the corpus is the jungle. The ANC collects blocks of text from newspapers, books and conversations so words and phrases can be viewed in their natural habitat—that is, in an American English context.

Readers can search the collection by word, phrase, part of speech or type of source and find their quarry used in a sentence or paragraph.

For students learning English as a second language, a corpus — Latin for body — can help teach idioms and tendencies in a way dictionaries cannot, as ANC users around the world have already discovered.

“I hear from language teacher trainers in Egypt, Germany, Japan and Sweden who are really excited to have these data available to them, so they can go in and look at aspects of conversation,” said Randi Reppen, English professor at Northern Arizona University and Project Manager for the ANC.

The ANC could also be used by advertising copywriters in search of resonant slogans, or by computer programmers to make automated customer service hotlines sound more natural, McKean said.

The ANC’s initial release last October, available on CD-ROM for $75 at www.americannationalcorpus.org, contains 11.5 million words. About one-fourth of the collection is made up of spoken English, including transcribed phone conversations from volunteers who were given phone cards in exchange for being recorded.

The rest of the corpus is written text contributed by The New York Times, the online magazine Slate, Langenscheidt travel guides and books from Oxford University Press on architecture and Abraham Lincoln.

“We want writers to want to be part of the American National Corpus,” McKean said. “We’re hoping to have an ANC logo that authors can have their publishers put on their books, as a way of saying, `My work is influencing the study of the English language.’”

By the end of 2005, the ANC, which last year received a grant from the National Science Foundation, hopes to release 100 million words — 90 million written, 10 million spoken — evenly balanced among sources as diverse as town meetings, medical journals and novels.

“It’s hard to take one area and say, `This is English,’” Reppen said. “By having different types of writing and speaking situations, the corpus gives a better picture for language researchers, teachers and learners.”

Until now, such seekers of untamed English have relied on other corpora such as the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of British English released 10 years ago. But in the last 10 years, new technology has made formatting samples of text faster and cheaper.

“We’re lucky that we’re doing it today,” McKean said. “This is something that would have been insane to do in the 1950s and was barely possible in the 1980s when the British National Corpus [started].”

Meanwhile, demand for corpora has grown in the field of computational linguistics, which uses computer programs to analyze the structure of language.

“The motivation for the ANC came from the fact that many computational linguists were using the BNC to gather statistics about
syntactic patterns, [when in fact] British English and American English are not alike in several ways,” said Nancy Ide, professor of computer science at Vassar College and Technical Director of the ANC.

Another new wrinkle in corpus linguistics is the Internet. The ANC plans to add e-mails, message boards and Web sites to its collection. McKean has already gotten permission from her message board of fellow “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans to use their posts for the ANC.

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