It's the nouns and verbs that catch our ears first. The complex words, the sediments of Greek and Latin affixes, the long noun phrases, the passive verbs. The surnames of researchers rising and fallen. The journal titles, the acronyms. You can also hear, in that perpetual dance with certainty, the hedges that soften claims ("it was reported that") or strengthen them ("though inconclusive, the data suggests..."). The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."

This "so" is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation. What follows "so" is another idea, insight, or fact—not because it's merely next in a series but because it's conceptually consequent: "So when chaperone proteins bind to their receptors, the process allows other bound proteins to expose their signal sequences." The versatility of this precursory "so" allows for a remarkable wealth of potential follow-through. The structure of the word itself makes it extremely useful, namely the sibilant "s" and the long, hollow "o," both of which are infinitely extendable and can carry a wild variety of emotional intonation. There's the curt "so," the wondering, wandering "soooooo," the exploratory "so?" In its crudest form it buys one time. At its most elegant, it facilitates the work of intellectual hopscotch—or Twister, if that's your game. "So" is here a verbal teleporter; it facilitates a leap from A to B that spares the listener the complexity in between without simultaneously dishonoring it. It abbreviates all the data, logic, information, or research experience that one might need to understand what follows. "So" is a transition between the "there" of specialized knowledge and the "here" of explanation.
Advertisement

In this explanatory role, the word frequents the vocabulary of certain groups more than others. While writing his book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis found "so" endemic to Silicon Valley. Microsoft employees claimed it as indigenous to Redmond, Washington, with the rest of their rich lexicon of geek-speak and corporate jive. Employees at Hewlett Packard survived boring meetings by counting the number of "so"s. A joke even circulated: What's the sound of Santa Claus at an HP Christmas party? "So so so!"

An oncology researcher at Johns Hopkins recently confessed to me that he says "so" with such frequency that his patients tease him about it; his colleagues are trying to help him break the habit. He figures he caught it from his boss: "We call it the 'so' virus." Indeed, as a staple entrée into an expository framework, "so" carries with it the attractive connotation of signaling the arrival of privileged information or hard-won knowledge. A mantle of authority easily assumed, if not legitimately earned.

But beyond this, can such a tiny word reveal anything about the metaphorical underpinnings and conceptual structure of scientific endeavors? In the 1990s, Columbia University psychologist Stanley Schachter counted how often professors said "uh" and "um" in lectures and found that humanists said them more than social scientists, and natural scientists said them less frequently of all. Because such words mark places where a speaker is choosing what to say next, Schachter argued, natural scientists' low hesitation rate underscored the hard facts they were communicating. "So" can be said to have the inverse relation for exactly the same reason. It relays a sense of accuracy and rigor. One doesn't have to worry about what to say as much as when to say it. "So" is the organizing device for a logic-driven thought process.

Former Microsoft engineer Alex Barnett wrote on his blog that "so" was a "delaminater" word. To him an idea was a concrete object, much like an onion. "So" was the word a speaker used to convey that another layer was peeling back. This metaphor implies that ideas have a kernel that one could reach with enough "so"s, a notion surely enticing to the problem-solvers and the goal-oriented. I prefer to think of "so" as a vehicle across a landscape of knowledge. It lies not so much in between points on a terminal trajectory, but more on perpetual journey across points of understanding. In this sense it shares some qualities with the infinite "why"s of a two-year-old. Another "so" can always follow the end of a thought. The trajectory is endless; the rabbit hole has no bottom. There will always be more questions for science to answer.

As a word that dwells in the lexicon of those who desire to understand and to learn, "so" is a marker of healthy intellectual tolerance. It is a hallmark of a robust cognitive approach to the world. But this is not to say that the "so" employed by professional explainers is all deduction and dialectic. It also implies an element of faith. This is the faith of any attempt to teach, argue, brainstorm, or present: the conviction that the person who is listening will understand what's being said and comprehend its significance. More than anything else, this fidelity may spring from a need to communicate; a fervent desire to exchange ideas and, in turn, build new ones. This is an inclination characteristic of many people. "So" is just more frequent on the tongues of those who do it best.

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

So you don’t remember Joe. Let me bring him back for you, then. In 1995 I moved from Austin to Alpine, a small town on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas, to spend a summer reading and doing some writing, far away from the city and a girlfriend who didn’t know how to love me. I moved into a stone cottage at a place called Cozy Courts, where Joe also lived. Just five years earlier, he had hitchhiked from Milwaukee, living under bridges and in shelters, to escape the snow and a wife he’d hated for 40 years. When I met him he’d just gotten back from a steamer trip through the Panama Canal. He told me stories about how he mocked the senior citizens at the senior center. This, I thought, is the way I want to grow old; this is how to stand up to life. He was 68; I was 26 and impressionable.

A self-taught man, he read Erasmus at 14, and his spiritual life fed on Charles Darwin. Give me reason, logic, and common sense, he always used to say. In the 1970s he bought yen and made a killing, but he’d grown up during the Great Depression in Brooklyn. To the end of his life, he kept most of his cash at hand, all in small bills, stuffed in boxes of soap and cereal. The man with cash is king, he used to tell me. The man with cash in his house becomes paranoid, I replied. He kept a .22-caliber pistol in a hollowed-out Bible on his dashboard and used to get up early on Sunday mornings, drive to a railroad bridge east of town, set up a limp piece of cardboard, and shoot it full of holes in five seconds. He was practicing for a gunfight, he told me. In the corner of his one-room cottage leaned a baseball bat, a broom, and a black matte double-pump shotgun. He kept a photocopy of the state laws about use of deadly force folded in his wallet. He wasn’t bug-eyed paranoid, but stiff and unapproachable, his back leg always cocked to flee or strike when anyone approached. He may or may not have been a cop in Milwaukee. But he had sold washing machines and taught high school science.

Joe had come to Texas so he could live the life of a boy again: tromp in the desert as he pleased, eat beans from a pot off the stove, read books until dusk sitting under the eaves of a cottage with his dog at his feet and the Southern Pacific rumbling into town on the tracks nearby and the swallows swooping down over the swimming pool and creasing its surface with their thirsty beaks. When I write about Joe I inevitably give more attention to the guns and the money, because I like breaking the dictum that a gun that shows up in the first chapter must be fired by the end of the story. Not so here. For me his character is plot enough.

I want you to know that he was a voracious reader. Entomology. Forensic sciences. Histories of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Bible studies, mainly books that showed how the Bible recycles Mesopotamian myth. I also want you to know about his generosity and his disdain. If you were a widow or a kid or someone genuinely deserving but were having bad times, he would drive you anywhere and even give you money. If a book was particularly good he would buy an extra copy and donate it to the library. If you were a priest or Christian believer, a stockbroker or a drug addict, he would cross the street before saying “hi.” I don’t want to entomb him in a caricature, but look: This was a man who cackled with delight when he proposed dressing as a devil in red pajamas, horns, pitchfork, and forked tail, and dancing down the aisle of the Baptist church on a Sunday morning. He read so avidly about the crimes of stockbrokers and the madness of crowds, you’d think someone had cheated him out of millions. He was an excellent student of human pride and its kaleidoscopic delusions, a dogged critic of all that was pretentious and vain, a bulldog and a lover of the desert who left not a thing behind beyond what I do to memorialize him. Michael, people are people, you can’t change people.

One day that summer I was outside talking to Joe, leaning on his pickup (which he called, mimicking a Mexican accent, his peekup), when Dennis, a guy in his 30s who was one of our neighbors, lumbered by on crutches like a giant uncomfortable bug. Dennis was a Mormon who went into trances every afternoon around 4 and spoke in tongues. Ha-hee-hee-ko-kuu-me-mee-maa-aa, he chanted, the nonsense syllables drifting among the cottages like bewildering dust. Six months before, while crossing the street, he’d been hit by a bicycle. Both his hips had been broken. Later in the summer I heard a cop say, “That guy? If he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

Dennis turned to us: “Hey Joe, you know what?”

“No, what?” Joe said, after a long pause. Once he’d called Dennis a “space cadet” and a “minister of Gawwwd.”

“They told me I can’t get unemployment benefits anymore,” Dennis said. “What am I gonna do? I can’t get money unless I’m homeless and out on the street. What’m I s’posed to do? How’s a guy s’posed to pay rent, ‘specially if he can’t work?” He said this in a thick, slobbery voice, and for a moment he sounded like he might cry. He pleaded, “What am I gonna do, Joe?”

Joe looked toward the street, up into the tree, down at his boots. Finally he said, “I don’t know, Dennis.”

Without a word Dennis turned away, as if he were familiar with this desert of sympathy, and lumbered on his crutches back to his cottage. When I tried to defend Dennis, Joe turned on me. “We’ve all had a hard life,” he shouted. “I could tell ...” Then he fell silent. I saw and heard flashes of the truth of his life and do not underestimate his resentments or the authenticity of their source. Who knows what he could have told me if he had ever told it all?

Joe wanted his ashes spread in the dry creek beds near Alpine, but maybe it’s just as well that he’s buried in Midland, where he can keep his eye on human conflicts, the sort that defined his life.

Listening to the priest at the funeral, I wanted to grab him and say, “If Joe were alive he’d smack your gilded missal and dance a jig on the Astroturf of his own grave, fling dollar bills to the wind and moon the slabs of granite soon to be his neighbors.”

These days his voice still comes to me: Michael, if you want to write about immigration, you should try the cemetery. They just won’t stop coming.

"The verb," Edward Mr. Vajda, linguistic adventurer, says. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration — and controversy — through his field .

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where he came across a book in Russian about a language called Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeneseic, of which Ket was the only survivor. One its siblings, Arin, is only known because a Cossack adventurer named Arzamas Loskutov wrote down words from the last Arin speaker in 1735.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs, a complex string of particles attached to a root that make up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," Mr. Vajda says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in Navajo, a Na-Dene language that he had studied. That was enough to pique his interest to pursue evidence of a connection between Na-Dene and Yeniseian — a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Although traces of tools and genes have established that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever demonstrated that languages spoken in both places are related.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met experts on American languages, on whose shoulders he would eventually stand. Also rewarding was a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, where he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. Mr. Vajda figures he may be one of the only non-Ket in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.

Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old, a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists had thought plausible and prudent. Searching for these sorts of relationships at such vast distances of time and space would get one dubbed a "long ranger," the name for a small, marginal group of linguists who like construct language families mainly by comparing lists of words. Finding homes for Ket, Basque, Finnish, and other isolated languages has been a favourite pastime. Imprudent, the mainstream calls it.

Mr. Vajda proved sympathetic to this big thinking. In 1996, he invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same language family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a CNN report that was seen by Raymond Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and member of the Dene First Nation. "That got us thinking," Mr. Yakeleya remembered, "were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?" Mr. Ruhlen put Mr. Yakeleya in touch with Mr. Vajda, who was by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," says Mr. Yakeleya, who is making a documentary about the Ket. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but as, as Dene, we always wondered about that, too." When asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-straits migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he's heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

Mr. Vajda spent the decade or so building an argument that would convince more than the long rangers. Just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

For help, he turned to the verbs. After learning as much as he could about the verb in modern Ket from its native speakers, he showed it has the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Connecting languages is such tricky work, because the potential confounds grow the further back (and further away) the connection. For one thing, unrelated languages can still look and sound alike because the human brain invented the same grammatical patterns in multiple places. Or, speakers of one language also borrow from other languages. And languages can, by following their own paths, accidentally begin to look like another language. Redrawing language families provides such valuable evidence about the migration and cultures of prehistoric peoples, it's crucial to do it right.

Mr. Vajda saw that comparing verbs wasn't enough. So he attacked another problem, how the languages acquired tone through the same processes of phonetic change. To top it off, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, the word for finger is təq; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'əq. He credited Mr. Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda had his chance to announce his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery, the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen very often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work is remarkable not only because it reaffirms the archaeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Straits. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis showing that Mr. Vajda's evidence is sufficient for establishing the ancient link.

"He has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons," says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist — and self-described curmudgeon — Lyle Campbell remains skeptical of the proposed Dene-Yeniseian connection. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says. For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 miles away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely." For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long. These are short enough to have occurred by chance.

"I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Mr. Campbell rattled off a long list of recent discoveries that have proven important for reconstructing the prehistoric human past. Among them are Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Oto-Manguean — three major language families in the Americas discovered in the 20th century, the last one an open question until the 1970s. The Sino-Tibetan family, Mr. Campbell noted, has been accepted for less than 50 years, and Austroasiatic less than 20 years. "So we do make some progress," he says. "We do find there are distant genetic relationship that we are able to prove."

Even more critical of Mr. Vajda is Merrit Ruhlen who wants credit for suggesting the connection first and who feels wronged by linguists like Johanna Nichols. The news of Mr. Vajda's discovery sparked a heated email correspondence between Mr. Vajda and Mr. Ruhlen, with Mr. Ruhlen airing old grievances and defending his work and Mr. Vajda scrambling to acknowledge previous work made as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

"You have to start off by comparing basic vocabulary," Mr. Ruhlen says. "Every language family has been found that way."

But Mr. Vajda's demonstration has set a benchmark for what's acceptable to the non long-rangers, who insist they're not biased. "I think the main thing [Mr. Vajda's work] does is resoundingly falsify the claim often made by long-range comparativists that mainstream linguists have set some upper limit on time depth and refuse to even consider the possibility of relatedness at a deeper level or beyond established family groupings," Nichols says. "Though difficult and time-consuming, discoveries of new language families are not impossibly rare."

Mr. Vajda also persisted in looking for a Ket-Dene connection in the face of research suggesting that modern Ket and Na-Dene speakers do not share any DNA material. In 2002, University of Kansas Michael Crawford published an analysis that showed that Ket speakers are genetically more related to their Siberian neighbours, and Na-Dene speakers to their neighbours. This doesn't automatically preclude a connection, since languages and genes don't necessarily travel together.

"Languages can be acquired from other unrelated groups, while you cannot 'learn' or acquire a genome," says Mr. Crawford.

However, Mr. Vajda says there is no evidence that the Ket or Athabaskans switched languages. "These two groups are known for their linguistic conservatism, which extends to a general aversion to borrowing foreign words," he says. Mr. Vajda believes that a DNA comparison should exclude people of Haida descent, since he believes that Haida, an endangered language spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, is not related to Athabaskan, Eyak, or Tlingit. Mr. Crawford's analysis included the Haida. And, says Mr. Vajda, the Ket have been intermarrying with their neighbours for millennia.

Raymond Yakeleya and others have welcomed Mr. Vajda's discovery as well. In 2005, he helped organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginals as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S, which strengthened his conviction that the Dene are curious about their origins.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging, too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders meeting in Yellowknife in 2009. When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket?

"Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

This is how those words are put together: Take a word, any old word, and say it to yourself 20 times out loud, until it loses its meaning and becomes just an absurd string of sounds. A word that has fallen far from its Latin source works very well for this: "fluff." Fluff. Fluff. Now restore this absurd string (f-l-u-f) to its meaning (fuzzy, feathery dust or fibers). Now you've glimpsed what a word is: a grafting of the arbitrary onto the utterly conventional.

If you were to forget that a word has these two halves, you would become vulnerable to thinking that words have mystical properties, that words like "fluff" have the very attributes of fluffiness. This is the path to the world of abracadabra peekaboo, in which if you can grasp the secrets of the right words (the thinking goes), the whole world will be revealed.

Words in and of themselves are about as interesting as nails. Which is to say, I find that what one does with words more interesting than the words themselves. A nail is inert unless it's being hit by a hammer grasped by an arm attached to a brain with a plan. So, too, with words. They can be the sharp point of the action, but they're not the actors, and they don't explain the action. If you try to tell the history of architecture through a history of nails, you get lots of blacksmiths, anvils and photos of nailheads buried in wood, but nothing about designing, building, or the other activities of architecture. Likewise, shaking down words for the keys to the secrets of American life, social or political or whatever, is an esoteric practice akin to cabala. It obscures more than it reveals, and is more elitist than it seems.

Being more pragmatic in my outlook, I'm more interested in people and their relationship to words than in words alone. For a real slice of life I prefer phrase books, books that are intended to help the reader do something. Two of my favorites are "Farm and Ranch Spanish" and "Spanish for the Housewife," written in the 1970s and reprinted in the 1990s by two Texans. The books are intended to "give the reader a working knowledge of Spanish, therefore saving much time and getting better results on the job, be it on the farm, ranch or in the home."

They're flawed and narrow but perfect depictions of a worldview. They're also so lily white and proper, I'm not sure how people who use them get "better results." If you don't have words for bodily functions and all the other outputs that make up the cycle of life and death on farms and ranches, how do you get things done? And if you only have the formal Spanish pronoun usted, not the familiar pronoun tu, how do you bring your Spanish-speaking employees into your confidence and social intimacy?

I'm less charged up by dictionaries, which have always seemed like boxes of nails. And I've never warmed to William Safire, who has always put a lot of stock in words and their singular importance. The title of his long-running column for The New York Times proclaims that he's writing "On Language," but it should actually be "On Words." He's billed as a language maven. He should really be called a vocabulary shaman.

Politics is verby. It's full of actors and audiences, people doing, resisting, manipulating, leading, apologizing, dealing, sneaking around. In other words, putting words to work. We're fascinated by the Spitzer scandal because of its salacious verbiness. As static as it has become, the Democratic presidential nominating process is still fairly verby.

"Safire's Political Dictionary," now out in a new paperback edition, is overwhelmingly nouny. He's all about the nails. In fact, his focus is so noun heavy, he doesn't list a verb until Page 40: "ballyhoo." Don't be fooled by "ballot box stuffing" on Page 39; that "-ing" marks the gerund, not the progressive verb. The next verb doesn't appear until Page 44, with "barnstorm." And after that, it's enough nouns to leave you logy: "bedsheet ballot," "benign neglect," "big stick." Ah, here's a genuine political verb: "bloviate."

Want to tell me the language of American politics? Give me in-house style memos at K Street spin shops and Senate men's room graffiti. Give me Google searches as trends over time, then show me the words that political Web site developers use to get their sites higher on search engines. Above all, tell me something about how people make sense of words and images—give me brain scans of average Americans as they watch CNN and Fox News side by side. But don't ask me to believe in the mystical power of words. "This is a lexicon of conflict and drama, of fulsome praise and fierce ridicule, of emotional pleading and intellectual persuasion," Safire writes. But the conjunctions "and," "but," "or" and "so" are also a lexicon of conflict and drama—in fact, little drama could take place without them.

Safire's dictionary certainly has its charms. It charts how some words and phrases became political tools (see the entries "is is, meaning of" and "macaca"), and it's packed with historical and political arcana (see the entry on "root, hog, or die," a political proverb from the 1830s), compliments that are slurs, slurs that look like something else, and even ventures into foreign politics with an entry on Adolf Hitler's use of the phrase "the night of the long knives" and a reference to Winston Churchill's poodle. "Great men do well to have small dogs," the lexicographer writes in the entry "Checkers speech," about Richard Nixon's 1952 speech denying he had received secret funds for personal use. The longest entry appears to be for " CIA-ese," or "spookspeak," which includes the terms "family jewels" and "wafflebottom" ("Rendition" gets its own entry).

But once I realized Safire's book isn't comprehensive enough to be a reliable reference work, it struck me that it's not even a dictionary, and it's not about words. It's not a phrase book either. What Safire has written is a postmodern political novel, arranged in a nonlinear fashion. It's a sprawling epic of American politics from the Revolution to the current day (with special emphasis on Watergate), arranged as fragments full of characters and scenes, in which the narrator, who calls himself "the lexicographer," pops up at random moments of political insiderness, claiming to be tracing the political lives of words. This kind of kaleidoscopic novel about American politics is one that Jorge Luis Borges or Roberto Bolano might have written if Safire hadn't, a novel about a made-up political system.

Scholars and pundits have pumped out a steady stream of analysis of political speaking and speeches, as if digging out the intent that lay behind the words is equivalent to their political impact. This is a dodge. Less and less do these words come from leaders' own pens than from their speechwriters and political consultants' pens. It's hard to stop glorifying the intention, though, because digging in the heads of political leaders is more glamorous than figuring out the brains of average folks. People who study political communication know surprisingly little about how people listen and what makes them change their behavior, even though massive portions of our economy (think advertising, education and health care) are dedicated to those pursuits.

What's needed is a history of political listening, not another one about political speaking; a history of audiences, not more on speechmakers. Not a count of words that were spoken, written, or broadcast, but the list of words that were heard. This is what keeps Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" on the best-seller lists: It discards the mystery of how words and images work and focuses on how people work. That's where the action is, with the hammer, the arm and the brain, but not the measly nail.

Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation.

Then there’s Derek Bickerton. One of the field’s old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho “street linguist” for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a “total lack of respect for the respectable” that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. “Bastard Tongues” is gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.

The book opens with Bickerton wading ashore on a remote Pacific island. If we discount bar stools, little of the subsequent action takes place in chairs. In fact, Bickerton always seems to be leaping out of them. After finishing his doctorate, he writes, he’d gotten all the nonsense out of the way and “could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff.” With this same irresistibly headlong tone, he describes jetting off to Guyana, Hawaii, Mauritius, Suriname and elsewhere to explore his ideas about languages without pedigrees.

Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don’t share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will “use words from your language if they know them; if not, they’ll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around.” Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China’s coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies.

Compared with pidgins, Creoles have bigger vocabularies and more grammar; the conventional view is that they are pidgins that became someone’s native language (though some linguists disagree). Many Creoles — like Saramaccan, an English/Portuguese Creole spoken in Suriname, and Seselwa, a French Creole spoken in the Seychelles — have more features in common (like their verbs) than you’d expect from languages that have never been in contact. Is this because they were created when English, French or Portuguese words were laid onto the same bed of grammar as African languages? Or because later generations learned both the pidgin and their parents’ languages, mingling the two? Or because a pidgin was created once, perhaps in a West African slave trade outpost or by sailors, and then transmitted elsewhere?

Bickerton swats down all these theories and explains how he arrived at his own solution, the language bioprogram hypothesis, which he elaborated in the book “Roots of Language” (1981). According to this idea, a pidgin becomes a Creole when children learn it, filling in the grammatical gaps with patterns and words that come not from any specific language but from some universal language template they all carry in their heads. This was an extension of Noam Chomsky’s influential claim for an innate universal grammar possessed uniquely by humans.

You’d expect an idea like the bioprogram hypothesis from someone with the habit of jumping out of chairs. Nailing it down, however, requires more “sitzfleisch” (literally, flesh for sitting) than Bickerton acknowledges having. Amid all the tales of partying with beautiful Brazilian graduate students and bouncing though the Colombian mountains in the back of trucks, he neglects to mention that other scholars (including some of his own students) have delivered some heavy blows to the bioprogram idea in the last decade. They’re unlikely to write memoirs, however, especially ones as diverting as “Bastard Tongues.” Bickerton invokes local histories, social factors and other variables to defend the bioprogram from the claim that all those grammatical bricoleurs in diapers didn’t push their Creoles in the same direction. Here’s where a peculiarity of Creole studies, which has rumbled in the background of the book, comes to the fore: evaluating any claim means whacking through a jungle of detail in which arguments about, say, verbs in some Dutch Creole depend on data about population crashes in Suriname in the late 17th century.

Bickerton may yet be proved right, especially if some reality-TV producer or billionaire philanthropist gets behind an experiment he hatched in the late 1970s. Bickerton proposed marooning six couples speaking six different languages along with children too young to have learned their parents’ language on a Pacific island for a year, to see what language the adults might figure out and how the kids might alter it. The National Science Foundation objected to the project on ethical grounds, and the experiment was not financed. Bickerton is happy to let someone else take up his idea and finally put a stop to all the “word wastage” of arguments about “how much language structure the brain can create.” “I’m out of it,” Bickerton writes — though the reader hardly believes his modesty. “I’ll consult, if asked. ... All I care about are the results.”

How words from far-flung tribes reveal a 10,000-year-old connection

'The verb," says Edward Vajda, linguistic adventurer. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration - and controversy - throughout his field.

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where he came across a book in Russian about Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeniseic, of which Ket was the only survivor.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs - a complex string of particles attached to a root that made up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," he says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in a Na-Dene language he had studied: Navajo.

Although traces of tools and genes have shown that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever found evidence of a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met with experts on American languages. On a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. (Mr. Vajda figures that he may be one of the only non-Ket people in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.) Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found out about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew that he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old - a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists consider plausible. He risked being dubbed a "long ranger," one of a small group who construct big language families mainly by comparing lists of words.

In 1996, Mr. Vajda invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a report on CNN that attracted the attention of Raymond Yakeleya. "That got us thinking," says Mr. Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and a member of the Dene First Nation. "Were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?"

He contacted Mr. Ruhlen, who put him in touch with Mr. Vajda, by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," Mr. Yakeleya says. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but, as Dene, we always wondered about that too." Asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-strait migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he has heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

But just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

He turned to the verbs, learning as much as he could about them in modern Ket from its native speakers. Eventually, he was able to show that they have the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Finally, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, for example, the word for finger is t/schwa/q; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'[schwa]q. He credited Merritt Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda announced his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery: the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work does more than just reaffirm the archeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Strait. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis that supported Mr. Vajda's evidence.

What's more, says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "he has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons, as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist Lyle Campbell remains skeptical. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says.

For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 kilometres away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely."

For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long - short enough to have occurred by chance. "I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Another critic of Mr. Vajda's work is Mr. Ruhlen, who wants credit for suggesting the connection first. In a heated e-mail correspondence, Mr. Ruhlen defended his work as Mr. Vajda scrambled to acknowledge work done as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

In 2005, Raymond Yakeleya helped to organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginal people as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders' meeting in Yellowknife in 2009.

When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket? "Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Michael Erard writes about language and linguistics from Portland, Me.

Jan Freeman, the regular language columnist for the Boston Globe, handed me her space when she went on vacation. This was my piece...

Wildness. We go outdoors, to the mountains or the ocean, to encounter the untamed and untameable. But this quality can be found closer to home, too -- our spoken sentences are full of wildness, right under the threshold of our attention.

I'm talking, of course, about verbal blunders.

By "verbal blunders," I mean one of two things. They can be slips of the tongue -- any moment where a speaker gets sounds out of order or selects the wrong word. The other day, my wife said "the fook I --" (stopping herself on the way) instead of "the food I cook." The same week a colleague pronounced her affairs to be in a "stad sate." Speech errors like these are unintentional accidents; linguists figure that a person makes about one or two of them every 1,000 words.

A verbal blunder can also be what's known as a "speech disfluency": "uh" and "um," repeated sounds and words, fragments of words, and sentence repairs, all of which occur when you're planning what to say next or realize you want to say something else. This isn't the same thing as stuttering, a disorder with neurological roots. I often speak disfluently, and so do we all: 5 to 8 percent of the words we say are somehow disfluent. So if American men and women say about 16,000 words a day (as a recent paper in Science calculated -- and no, women apparently don't talk more than men) that makes for some 800 to 1,280 disfluencies daily.

It's typical to think of verbal blunders as embarrassing slip-ups that we should avoid. But I've just written a whole book about verbal blunders, and I find them fascinating. Why? Because they're signs of the wild. Not in the sense of rough or savage, but because they're pure and untameable. They provide a window into what humans really are: biological organisms who live in complex groups and have really amazing brains. Blunders of the verbal sort may seem like violations of the order of language, but in fact they're spontaneous eruptions of the qualities that gave us this order in the first place.

Verbal blunders are uniquely human: If other species don't have language like humans do, then only we make verbal blunders. There's some evidence that the bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha, who are part of a language program at Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, occasionally make errors in selecting the visual symbols with which they communicate, but these aren't really slips. And though some zebra finches sometimes stutter, these aren't disfluencies in the same sense as the ones humans produce, because the phrases of their songs aren't as long or varied as human speech.

Verbal blunders are also universal -- they occur in every language, both spoken and signed. Every human language provides its speakers with a way to signal some delay, either with a filler word, a pause, or a repeated word. Slips of the tongue in a particular language will follow the sound patterns and word structures of that language; a malapropism or a spoonerism in English will always sound like English, not Cherokee.

Though we might make 7 to 22 slips of the tongue a day, we typically only notice about one a week, and the majority of disfluencies don't even register to our ears. This suggests that we're evolved to perceive a message despite any "noise" in an utterance, and that we filter out most distractions automatically. So noticing someone's "uhs" and "ums" says as much about your filter as about the speaker's style.

Instead of sitting in judgment over blunders, linguists and psychologists use them as tools to pry language open. Slips of the tongue are useful in this way because they possess a surprising amount of order -- for instance, accidental word blends such as "behortment" (which mixes "behavior" and "deportment") will always have the same number of syllables and stress patterns as the original two words. Such patterns suggest, among other things, that words exist as skeletons into which sounds are slotted. Slips of the tongue were the original way linguists came to understand this, before experiments and instruments confirmed it.

Not all interpretations of verbal wildness hold up over time. Sigmund Freud listened to verbal blunders and heard people losing control of their unconscious desires, but contemporary psycholinguists now think that so-called Freudian slips -- despite their hold on the popular imagination -- were fashionable interpretations after the fact, not adequate explanations of why slips happened. And there's never been enough evidence to suggest that slips are rooted in something about the speaker rather than in the act of speaking itself.

Though slips of the tongue and speech disfluencies have different causes, I put them together because of their wildness -- both disrupt the way we want to present ourselves. That's why people either laugh at verbal blunders or try (in the case of disfluencies) to eradicate them. But I like what Elizabeth Zwicky, who grew up with linguists for parents, said about paying attention to verbal blunders. Not only are you always going to be amused wherever you go, but you also become less stressed out by them. It's like being a birdwatcher. "Birdwatchers," she said, "have a richer experience of birds than anybody else."

To see the original layout, go here.

I have one word for you glib, fluent people, you who sound smooth, scripted, and rehearsed, who execute each sentence with crisp precision, because your success may be at stake:

“Um.”

Here and there you can catch a new attitude about this and other hesitations to the ideal, uninterrupted flow of speaking. Barack Obama’s main political consultant, David Axelrod, likes to record video of people on the street for political ads; they inevitably say “uh” or “um,” which he likes, he says, because it’s more authentic.

In the 2005 business language jeremiad, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, the authors advocate that speakers be more relaxed. “It’s not a bad thing to open the kimono in celebration of those ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ for all the world to see,” they write. (For those of you who are not idiots, “open the kimono” is corporate jargon for “letting down your guard” or “showing one’s hand.”)

When Condoleezza Rice first became Secretary of State, she uttered “uh” and “um” in public statements with surprising frequency, given her experience and position. At first glance (or listen) she was warming up to the new role, but the style has persisted. Whether intended or not, the effect seems to be that Rice isn’t reciting talking points, she’s opening the kimono of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans began to prefer um-less speech in the early 20th century, as an increasingly complex and urbanizing society boosted the value of planning and efficiency. Saying “um” was a sign that the bureaucracy in your head, of your self, was breaking down. Burgeoning technologies drew attention to verbal embarrassment, as the phonograph and the radio captured evidence of the fleeting inefficiencies of everyday speaking.

Teachers of public speaking contributed to this newly valued um-lessness: They boiled eloquence down to a set of traits—among them, not to say “uh” and “um.” By the 1920s, after decades of silence on the matter, books of etiquette urged young men and women to mind their ums, too. In 1928, author Helen Hathaway warned in Manners: American Etiquette that “puncturing our sentences with ah’s and er’s, mincing our words, [and] employing affected tones and gestures, are tricks annoying even to our friends and positively repellant to strangers.” Even psychotherapists frowned on so-called filled pauses. In 1959, psychiatrist Sandor Feldman wrote about patients whose “moaning-like ‘er…er…er…’ is annoying,” in Mannerisms of Speech and Gesture in Everyday Life. The only rule no one seems to have written was that you shouldn’t say “um” when talking to yourself.

Uttering “uh” and “um” is the sign of thought, a symptom of an additional mental load, rather than the absence of thinking. While the fashions of public speaking change, the psychological facts about language remain the same. For instance, we conventionally believe that people who say “um” a lot when they speak are unsure, over-careful, or nervous. However, in the 1950s George Mahl, a Yale psychologist, overturned that theory by measuring the number of times his subjects said “uh” or “um” against their levels of stomach acid—and found no correlation. What he did find was that for more a reliable marker of anxiety, we should notice how frequently a speaker restarts a sentence, repeats a word, or utters a fragment of a word.

One of these “speech disturbances” (as Mahl called them) occurs once in every 4.4 seconds of speaking, on average. About six percent of the words that normal speakers say aren’t pronounced without some sort of interruption, which has probably been true for the 100,000 years that humans have had language. Why? Because everyone has to plan what to say next. Some of us opt for “uh” and “um” at those junctures. It’s as if we can either think or speak—but not both at once. Nearly all of the psychological and cognitive research that has since been done in this area, which was inspired by George Mahl, says that uttering “uh” and “um” is the sign of thought, a symptom of an additional mental load, rather than the absence of thinking. But while it’s rare for someone to be able to have novel ideas and speak perfectly fluently, many of us continue to equate fluency of speech with fluency of thought.

So why the new lenience toward “uh” and “um?” Perhaps it represents a rhetorical resource that hasn’t been exhausted yet. Someone less cynical might suggest that American audiences simply want more variety in their broadcasted voices. It could also be related to the architectural impulse that exposes conduit and pipe in buildings or opens restaurant kitchens—a desire to see the backstages of life where the action really happens—like people on the street talking about Barack Obama. Or it could be an assertion of uniquely human qualities to counteract technological values that have pushed too far. A verbal dissent, so to speak.

But beware celebrating the open kimono. Not all people who say “um” are spontaneous and authentic, just as not all those who speak smoothly and fluently are more intelligent or competent. The phone message that starts, “Uh, yeah, hi, this is Bob,” may still be a telemarketer. “This business of keepin’ it real—it can be carried too far, and it can come across as arrogant,” writes Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker about the television version of This American Life: “Real is earned.”

So let me offer another way out of the style wars that will stand the test of time. A study by Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego, showed that about half the listeners to a speech naturally pay attention to the content. The other half listen to the style. But when the content gets boring, obvious, or offensive, the content listeners switch to listening for style. The solution for getting fewer people to notice your speaking style—and those pesky “ums”—is pretty clear:

Be more interesting.

The original layout from The Morning News can be seen here.

Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language Is Processed

Researchers are analyzing spoonerisms and other slips of the tongue to help understand how humans--and even apes--can comprehend and use language

Kanzi, a 27-year-old bonobo, knows the difference between a blackberry and a hot dog. But sometimes, when researchers asked him to touch the abstract visual symbol, called a lexigram, that means blackberry, he touched the lexigram for hot dog, blueberries, or cherries instead.

Kanzi's errors weren't random mistakes, nor an indication of apes' language limitations, says Heidi Lyn, a comparative cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K. Rather, they show the complex way in which his mind had organized the lexigrams. For example, if Kanzi made a mistake when asked for "blackberry," he was more likely than chance to choose a lexigram for another fruit, much as you or I might say "red" instead of "black," says Lyn, whose paper on Kanzi's mistakes was published online in Animal Cognition in April and will appear in print later this year or early next.

Analyzing errors for insight into the covert mental processes of animals is a new direction for a technique that language scientists have used for 40 years to study language processing in humans. For all its power, human language remains something of a scientific mystery. Researchers are still struggling to understand exactly how humans hear, comprehend, and produce words and sentences. Slips of the tongue, or linguistic mistakes made inadvertently by speakers who do know the correct form, offer potent clues about language processing in the brain. Speech error research is currently on the upswing with new methods and theories and increased attention to groups such as children and users of sign language--and, now, animals. "We have a long way to go before we understand how to put the multiple pieces of language systems together in the seamless way that we experience it," says psycholinguist Merrill Garrett of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who has studied slips of the tongue since the 1970s. "Error profiles that arise during spontaneous conversation are going to be an important part of the agenda."

Barn doors and darn bores

Early in the 20th century, collecting speech errors was chiefly a hobby, especially for people who found Freud's emotional explanations lacking. (Psychoanalysis had no way to account for the diverse, often mundane slips of the tongue that people make.) In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky sparked a wave of grammatical theorizing that transformed speech errors into theoretical gold. Linguist Victoria Fromkin, among others, argued in the late 1960s that speech errors showed that abstract mental units of sounds and words were also concrete symbols in speakers' minds.

Using speech errors as scientific data posed some problems: Waiting for speakers to make an error required an inordinate amount of time, and some questioned the reliability of what listeners heard. But the field got a boost in the 1970s when researchers created ways to elicit many (but not all) types of speech errors in the lab. One method involved giving people word pairs like "duck bill," "dart board," and "dust bin," then asking them to say "barn door." About 10% of the time, subjects said "darn bore." By eliciting speech errors, researchers can control for higher frequency sounds (in English, "s" is more frequent than "k") and words ("latrine" is more frequent than "tureen"). Words used more frequently are less likely to be involved in speech errors. For example, more errors occur with content words ("cat," "hat") than grammatical words ("the," "in"), because grammatical words are used more frequently. The effect of frequency also implies that what one usually talks about affects how one slips.

Lyn was the first to apply the study of errors to bonobos. Kanzi and a female bonobo, Panbanisha, who now live at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, can comprehend instructions and descriptions in spoken English, and they can respond by using 384 lexigrams, which they touch on a keyboard. From 1990 to 2001, researchers tested the bonobos thousands of times, showing them a photo or lexigram or saying an English word. The bonobos then had to select the matching lexigram. The apes chose correctly 12,157 times and made 1497 incorrect choices, although no one thought to consider the errors as data until now.

Lyn found that Kanzi and Panbanisha have arranged hundreds of lexigrams in their minds in a complex, hierarchical manner based mainly on their meaning. She coded the relations between all 1497 sample-error pairs along seven dimensions, including whether the lexigrams looked alike, had English words that sounded alike, or referred to objects in the same category. She found that the errors were not random but patterned. If the lexigram stood for "blackberry," the error was more likely than chance to sound like blackberry, be edible, be a fruit, or be physically similar. Errors were also more likely to be associated with more than one category. For example, "cherries" are both edibles and fruits, and the word sounds like the correct one, "blackberries." All this indicated to Lyn that mental representations of the lexigrams must be stored not as simple one-to-one associations but in more complex arrangements. This suggests that, given the chance, bonobos and other apes can acquire systems of meaning that are closer than anyone has thought to what humans do, and that some aspects of language acquisition are not unique to humans. "We begin to see that the biological or species variable is far less important than we thought," says Susan Savage-Rumbaugh of the Great Ape Trust.

Out of the mouths of babes

Lyn's analysis is not the first to study errors in creatures that haven't mastered all the complexities of human speech: For about 20 years, researchers have also used speech errors to study language acquisition in children. Kids do say the darnedest things, but by definition, the true errors are the ones they make with linguistic levels and units they know, explains linguist Jeri Jaeger of the University at Buffalo in New York state, who in 2005 published a book that capped 20 years of collecting kids' slips, many of them from her three children. It was the first study of the same children's speech errors over a long period, allowing her to match their errors with their stages of language development. Jaeger's collection is "unique," says linguist Annette Hohenberger of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and shows how slips change over time.

Distinguishing true slips took a linguist's ear and a mother's patience. Jaeger's youngest daughter's exclamation that "She already showed me tomorrow!" wasn't a true slip, because she didn't yet know the meaning of "yesterday." On the other hand, at 16 months, her eldest daughter said "one two three, one two three, one tuwee"--a fusion of "two" and "three," which was a true slip because she knew the two words were distinct and had regularly pronounced them correctly. This anchors Jaeger's point that children only make slips with what they know.

Analysis of such speech errors can provide a novel perspective on how children acquire language. Linguists have debated, for instance, whether children need syntactic knowledge to speak in two-word clumps. Jaeger says no. Her data show that when children begin to combine words, at about age 2, they don't blend phrases or confuse intonations. Such slips require a mature knowledge of syntax. Not until children speak in sentences of three or more words do syntactic errors, such as "sit down this immediately!" (a blend of "sit down this minute" and "sit down immediately") appear.

It's long been known that children make more speech errors than adults, but it wasn't known how or if aging affected error rates. In 2006, Janet Vousden and Elizabeth Maylor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. published the first study tracking speech errors across the life span and reported no significant increase in total errors between young and older adults. However, compared to children, adults made proportionately more errors in which a sound segment was anticipated (frive frantic fat frogs) rather than perseverated (five frantic fat fogs).

That fits with a widely used model of speech errors developed in the 1980s by cognitive scientist Gary Dell of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Most linguists think that words and sounds are stored in a kind of network in the brain, connected by variables such as how they sound, their parts of speech, and their meaning. Dell proposed that when sounds or words stored in such a network are selected, this also strengthens or "activates" neighboring words or sounds, which may be misread as the right ones. In his model, people forced to speak quickly make more errors not because they have more opportunities to do so but because the stimulation of neighboring units has less opportunity to fade. Dell also proposes that practice tends to activate present and future units more than past ones. As a result, the more practice a speaker has, the higher the proportion of anticipatory errors, although overall errors decrease. "Whatever makes you more error-prone makes your errors more perseveratory," explains Dell. Caroline Palmer, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has found the same effect (among others) in piano performances.

Language need not be spoken, and linguists have long been interested in whether speech and sign are processed the same way. German linguists Hohenberger and Daniela Happ and Helen Leuninger at the University of Frankfurt used a newer method for eliciting slips from German speakers and signers of Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS, or German Sign Language), in the first slip study of signers in a language other than American Sign Language. In a series of papers, the most recent published in 2007, they asked speakers and signers to narrate a series of pictures under various stress conditions, such as putting pictures out of order.

They found that all types of slips found in spoken German are also present in DGS, although in different frequencies. The slips also occur with the same basic units. This indicates that signs and words are both stored in the brain as clusters of primary elements that can be flexibly recombined, and it underscores that humans possess a single language faculty regardless of how they deploy it, says Hohenberger.

But there are some differences. For instance, both signers and speakers catch and repair utterances that include mistakes. But signing is relatively slower, so signers catch more errors involving exchanges of individual signing elements, such as hand shapes or location of the sign.

Because of this, Hohenberger speculates that slips of the hand may next contribute to an emerging question in slip-of-the-tongue research. Based on ultrasound studies of speakers' tongues as they make sound exchanges (better known as spoonerisms, such as "jeef berky" instead of "beef jerky"), phonetician Marianne Pouplier of the University of Munich, Germany, has suggested in several recent papers that speakers don't substitute one whole sound segment for another as was previously thought. Rather, they attempt to pronounce the two sounds at the same time. This way of thinking about speech errors--as a collision of motor commands rather than as substitutions of mental symbols--might be more reliably investigated in slips of the hand, Hohenberger says, because researchers can capture the slower hand movements more clearly than tongue movements.

Although error studies offer intriguing data, their implications are not always clear. Take the bonobo findings. The apes confused fewer target-error pairs that were either both nouns or both verbs, implying that they don't take note of parts of speech. "This result argues against the claims made elsewhere that Kanzi has spontaneously developed an elementary grammar," says primatologist Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania.

But Lyn says the error results don't directly address the question of grammar and don't contradict earlier findings in which bonobos appeared to prefer certain semantic sequences. Instead, she says, "the results support the idea that [apes'] representation of semantic information is much more complex than has been shown to date."

Still, the study of bonobo errors does rebut two frequent criticisms of ape language research: that the apes have simply been trained to respond, and that researchers may inadvertently shape the bonobos' responses. Errors can't be trained, nor can patterns of errors be deliberately produced. And if researchers were subtly guiding the apes by eye gaze or body posture, Kanzi and Panbanisha might have made far more errors based on simple proximity in the keyboard.

Lyn plans to continue analyzing the error data for other insights into the bonobos'conceptual world. "For me, the error analysis was not to just study one aspect of their symbolic representation," Lyn says, "but to get a glimpse of how it all hangs together." Such a big question hasn't been answered for human language, either, but speech errors will likely be central to the search. Says the University of Arizona's Garrett: "We have most certainly not reached the limits of that kind of research."

Call of the Truck Stop: Gentlemen, Stop Your Engines

THOUGH Robert Jordan clocked three million miles in nearly 30 years hauling Wisconsin cheese around the United States, he never considered himself a typical trucker. On the road he listened to educational books on tape. He drove slower than almost everyone else, and he never saw the point of running the engine when the truck wasn't moving.

When he started driving in the late 1980s, idling at truck stops, rest areas and loading docks was common, as truckers sought to keep their cabs and sleeper berths comfortable. ''Trucks were spending more time idling than they were moving,'' he said. ''I said, this is so stupid. This is such a waste of energy.''

If idling is now a popular topic among truckers, it is because the practice is endangered. Sirius Radio's Trucking Network is filled with talk about anti-idling legislation (30 states, counties and cities have laws limiting idling), and the market for technology to reduce idling has exploded as owners adapt to regulations and try to preserve thin profits by reducing fuel costs. Mr. Jordan is in the thick of the discussion: he was named Trucker of the Year in 2006 by Overdrive Magazine, a trade journal, for waging his own quiet war on idling.

In 1993, Mr. Jordan bought his own truck, and eventually, he figured he could save on maintenance and fuel if he didn't idle. To keep warm without the engine running, he tried sleeping in a sleeping bag, which was inconvenient and uncomfortable. Next he hacked the truck to pump coolant from the engine to move heat into the cab, reducing the idling. After he insulated his cabin, he built a heater out of halogen lights.

At one point he cut a hole in his sleeper to install an $88 air-conditioner, which ran off batteries. A million miles or so later, he had worked out the details of an electrical relay that would charge a 100-pound bank of batteries if the cab was hooked up to a refrigerated trailer.

The device, called a reefer link, is attractive because it produces no extra emissions. At any time, only 8 percent to 12 percent of long-distance trucks are hauling refrigerated trailers, but the reefer link also allows the truck to be plugged into truck-stop outlets, called ''shore power.'' And the batteries can power small heaters and air-conditioners that have already been designed for the trucks' cabins. Each reefer-link system costs $6,000 to $7,000, and since he got a patent last December, Mr. Jordan has received enough orders to retire from driving to grow his business. (He says he doesn't miss the road.)

Every day in the United States, almost half a million long-haul trucks are on the road, and most spend part of each day idling. Long-haul trucks idle 500 to 3,500 hours a year, burning a half gallon to one and a half gallons of diesel fuel an hour. According to the Department of Energy, this consumes up to a billion gallons of diesel fuel a year. The Environmental Protection Agency calculates that idling also spews 11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 200,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen and 5,000 tons of particulate matter into the air annually.

Trucking companies used to eat the cost of idling, including paying fines of $50 to $22,500. But rising fuel prices have taken the cost of idling to more than $3 an hour. ''It's to the point where you can get a motel room cheaper than you can idle the truck,'' Mr. Jordan said.

Now freight companies are instituting policies to limit idling, providing incentives to drivers to reduce it or installing devices to shut down an engine automatically. Wal-Mart has put idle reduction technologies in 7,000 of its trucks. Schneider National, a shipping company with 11,000 trucks, is testing two cooling systems, one a 12-volt air-conditioner and the other a coolant storage system; 9,000 trucks already have diesel-fired heaters.

A 2005 survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, involving 55,000 day and sleeper trucks, found that 36 percent used a range of idle-reduction technologies. Respondents said they had spent nearly $8.8 million on these technologies and expected to spend $56 million more.

External power sources at truck stops are another solution. These are attractive to states and cities because they help them meet air quality goals. The Department of Transportation estimates that 60 of 5,000 truck stops in 11 states allow trucks to plug into local power or have equipment in parking areas that pumps cool or hot air into the cabs. The capacity exists, however, for only 30 percent of trucks on the road.

Mr. Jordan was not the only driver who had modified his truck in search of other solutions to idling. In 1984, Rex Greer, a New Mexico driver, bolted a motorcycle engine to his truck to serve as an auxiliary power unit and later received a patent for a diesel version of his invention, which he labeled the Pony Pack. The unit runs on fuel drawn from the truck's main tank, using about a pint an hour. Its main advantage is that truckers can use it anywhere. ''What does a trucker do if he's shut down for three days in a blizzard?'' Mr. Greer said. Since the 1990s, Pony Pack has sold 4,000 units, but this year, Mr. Greer has already received that many orders, signaling that idle reduction is a new priority for truckers.

The biggest obstacle may be drivers themselves. Linda Gaines, a scientist at Argonne Nation

It’s a couple of days after Mel Gibson’s Mayan fantasy Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection.

Yucatec Maya (or simply “Maya” if you’re in the Yucatán) is spoken by a million or so people on the peninsula, in Belize, and in northern Guatemala. As we travel, we notice it everywhere: in the markets, the hotels, even written on the plaques at Mayan ruins along with Spanish and English. (In other parts of Mexico, the signs appear in Tseltal or Nahuatl, other local indigenous languages.) Because we’re traveling for nearly a month, I figure wouldn’t it be cool to learn some words of Maya, to be able to bust it out while buying fruit or asking directions, not out of necessity—we can do everything we need in Spanish—but because of all the things one encounters as a traveler, language leads to some pure, real connections. Buying something? In my mind, handing over currency always reinforces who’s a tourist and who’s not, who has money and who doesn’t. Simple greetings and politenesses? That’s real, but anyone can do it. Kissing? Out of the question—this is my honeymoon.

I ask Agosto the Maya word for monkey; it’s something like maax (pronounced “maash”). I ask the word for “howler monkey,” and he says something else. Which is when I encounter the first of several difficulties in my adventure in Maya: I didn’t bring a notebook, and I have a memory like a sieve. Ten feet down the path I’ve forgotten the word for “howler monkey.” And if I did have a notebook, now’s not the time to whip it out, as wet limestone ridges and tree roots block the path we take with our eyes to the trees, hoping to see a monkey chuckle across the sky through the branches.

A lot of the Apocalypto press describes Yucatec Maya as an “ancient” language, which isn’t accurate. Though it’s a descendant of the Classic Mayan spoken by the inhabitants of the empires whose ruins we admire, it’s a very contemporary language, beset by all the problems faced by indigenous languages in Mexico and elsewhere in the world: Young people opt to speak the dominant language; the government doesn’t support indigenous-language education; the indigenous language carries a stigma. This is the next set of obstacles I encounter in my Mayan learning plan: It’s not a language that native Mayan speakers seem to be happy to have outsiders speaking.

At one museum bookstore, I found Maya For Travelers and Students, a remarkable book published in 1995 by the University of Texas Press and written by linguist Gary Bevington. When he describes how to learn Maya—not in classrooms, but in the field, where everyone’s a teacher and no one will cut you slack—he knows what he’s talking about. He set out over multiple summers (many of them in a camper) to learn Yucatec Maya. The book is a lucid guide to the language itself, its grammar and its sounds, which include some interesting consonants pronounced with a popping sound. Because no Yucatec Maya word has a dominant stress on any syllable, speakers have a fluid, singsongy, swishing quality—it’s attractive sounding to my ears, a language you want to hear more of, not less.

Culturally, Maya speakers tend not to go for big, empty promises, Bevington explains, unlike Mexicans or Americans do, so if you want to learn Maya, it’s not enough to say, “I’m really interested in the language.” You have to show people that you’re not just gawking. “Remember,” Bevington writes, “that from the native perspective you are an odd thing that dropped from the sky into the middle of their well-ordered and busy world. You are disruptive and confusing because people of your ilk are expected to be remote and generally disdainful of their world.”

Even if we were planning to return to Punta Laguna, it turns out that we need much more experience in how invested a person is in his or her indigenousness, and what situations will call it forth. Bevington warns against trying to speak Maya with hotel help at tourist resorts, and “anyone who sees himself or herself as official or important or sophisticated” should always be addressed in Spanish. Because Agosto also speaks English and Italian, and works for an Italian primatologist, we assumed we were dealing with someone Western and metropolitan. Someone like us. A person, that is, who understands that pimping out one’s tourism with some words from the language poses no threat.

But Punta Laguna didn’t make that so easy. It’s also an “alternatour” destination for ecotourists from Tulum and Cancun, who are attracted by monkeys, descriptions of ruins (indeed, there’s a small temple on the preserve), and the chance to see and meet real, live Mayas in their houses. One feature of the tour is talking to a Mayan shaman in the jungle who will, under the sacred ceiba tree, demonstrate traditional rituals. Unlike the ecotourists, we camped in the preserve. Early the next morning, Agosto came to wake us so we could see the monkeys moving. As soon as we popped our heads from the tent, we saw two male howler monkeys swing on branches over the road. He promised more spider monkeys, so we followed him on another trek through the jungle, and under the ceiba tree we bumped into the shaman, a man in his 50s with a deeply creased face, sitting near a fire. He also turned out to be Agosto’s father. Agosto introduced us and pointed out the altar, and we talked about the sack of copal, the aromatic tree resin, that he burns for ecotourists.

After we walked away, realizing that we’d just seen a sacred aspect of Maya life tricked out for tourists, I should have just said, in Spanish or English, thanks for introducing us to your father and showing us the altar and the ceiba tree, we’re honored by that. Instead, wanting to compensate for having seen a sacred aspect of Maya life, I said in Spanish to Agosto, “I’d like you to teach me how to say in Maya, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’” (Because I should be prepared to meet a shaman in the jungle, right?)

Agosto stopped, turned to me, and quickly rattled off a long string of words, what sounded like 20 or 30 syllables. I lamely repeated a few syllables, left in his verbal dust. He rattled off the string again, just as quickly, then gave the Spanish translation. I shrugged. There was no following what he’d just said, and he wasn’t repeating. It occurred to me he might have been annoyed: It was 7 a.m., he’s a biologist, not a language teacher, and the question is ill-timed, a distraction. I was still confused, though. We thought we’d been having a genuine interaction with him. But the dark waters of the tourist sphere, in which the real and authentic are performed and sold, lay closer than we thought. People in Punta Laguna charge admission to their houses, so why not to the language, too? Or was the language where they drew the line? Agosto became chilly and left us behind to look for monkeys on his own.

We talked about Agosto for days, puzzling over what we’d encountered, even once we had reached Tulum, a Caribbean coastal city, to spend some time on the beach. I was going to take a few days off from asking about Maya; once we got back on the road, I’d resume. I still listened, and thought I heard someone say something in Maya that could have been “thank you,” but I wasn’t sure. Later that night, in a group conversation under a darkened palapa that served as the lobby of the hotel, the clerk, a young man named Jesús, asks me if I speak Spanish.

Yes, I say, then joke: “Do you?”

“Sort of,” he says. “I speak more Maya.”

I perk up—this is my chance. “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Maya?”

He whirls around. “Who are you? Where are you from? Why do you want to know?”

I’m from Texas, I say, and I study languages, and we’re traveling in Mexico for a month, so I’ve been picking up some Maya words. He explains that his grandmother taught him that he should guard his language, because it was a secret. Then he tells a story about his uncle, a farmer, who had found a Maya ceramic that he had to hide: If the government knew he possessed it, they’d take it away.

I’m not a missionary, I say, and I’m not looking to buy artifacts, either. I’m just interested in the language. After he’s stated his position and I’ve stated mine, he says he thinks there are powerful intelligences on the planet that we don’t know anything about, and that he believes he is a holy man. He’s a little crazy, but the air seems to clear as far as Yucatec Maya is concerned, and a few words dribble out of him. He’s sitting with a stray puppy on his lap and offers that the word for “dog” is peek’.

“Peek’,” I say. Where’s my notebook? It doesn’t matter. Somehow, I think that one will stick.

“Yes, peek’,” he replies.

Now, I think to myself, we’re getting somewhere.

I am sitting in a cubicle, talking into a telephone headset, asking rote questions of people who have applied for life insurance. Today it's a woman, mid-20s, somewhere in New Hampshire.

"Occupation?"

"I'm self-employed."

"What industry do you work in?"

"Entertainment."

Her obliqueness is costing me money, because I get paid per interview. But I play along. "Who do you entertain?"

"Men."

"Men? Or gentlemen?"

I could hear her smirk. "Gentlemen," she replied coolly.

I held this job for six weeks in 2002, at the start of the bleakest period of my writing career. When I wrote my first column for this site about leaving academe and starting to work as a freelance writer, I felt like a shiny quarter, bright with promise. Life was rosy. Then life became not rosy. Then difficult.

I didn't yet have to strip for my supper, but I needed a gig that would provide a hard revenue stream -- money from my freelance writing was too soft, too irregular. So, here I was, spending eight hours a day in a cramped cubicle, asking a list of required questions about intimate aspects of health, finance, and habits. Did you smoke? Why did you declare bankruptcy? Are you an exotic dancer or a topless dancer? Does the difference matter? (To the insurance companies, it does.)

I wasn't supposed to deviate from the list, which led to bizarre exchanges, such as the time I asked someone's sweet 85-year-old Georgian grandmother if she had ever been skydiving.

"Oh, no," she laughed.

"Do you have any plans to?" Just doing my job, ma'am.

"Oh no," she said. "The only time my feet will leave the ground is when the Lord comes to take me away."

If you could have wheeled some device over my skull that interpreted the electrical patterns in my brain, you wouldn't have seen me regretting my decision to leave a traditional academic career. I knew that was the right decision for me.

Yet you would have seen me a bit puzzled. After all, I had taken my own advice from my first column: I built relationships, I wrote with clarity, I put a lot of research into my freelance proposals. I had passion and a Ph.D.

So what was the problem? As I would eventually realize, I needed a better business model. That brain-reading device would have shown clumps of neurons groping blindly toward each other, hoping to trigger an insight that would get me one of those models.

A business model? In one sense, it's exactly what it sounds like: the way you bring in revenue. There's more to it, of course, but for me, the first step was realizing that this wasn't a race; that I had to plan and measure my success according to sustainable parameters. Moreover, I could set those parameters; I wasn't being judged from the outside. What I jettisoned first was my assumption that all of my income had to come from writing, or any one source. When I realized that I needed a mixed revenue stream, that was the beginning of getting a business model.

You don't have to be a writer or an entrepreneur to have a business model; we all have one, most of us tacitly. The business model is the plan for how you integrate the parts of your life. It combines personal philosophy with economic facts; it's the set of assumptions about how you want to be in the world upon which you make decisions. For me, the following factors were important: I had to decide whom I wanted to write for and whom I couldn't afford to write for anymore. I had to decide if I was going to craft myself as a specialist in some area or write about many topics. I had to think about how I would leverage my Ph.D. to enhance my credibility, or whether I would leave it behind.

I knew I was a "freelancer," but I construed it one way, as a monolithic autonomy, when in fact there are dozens of ways to be entrepreneurial. Each of them, however, involves articulating the assumptions about your preferences and talents. Your friends with "regular" jobs get to leave those assumptions unspoken. (What seems so offensive about tenure is that it enables the ultimate tacitness: the deliberate ignorance of the future.)

Things got much worse on my way to a business model, however. While I worked the cubicle job, I was revising some old fiction and still writing pitches, calling editors on my bathroom breaks. Finally, one of my pitches succeeded, and I was off to California and Missouri to write about a federal prisoner who was resisting medication to make him "mentally competent" to stand trial.

With that assignment in place, I announced at the insurance company that I was quitting, and became a minor hero. I had gone from a bumbling trainee to someone seizing his destiny. As I walked out those doors, life looked rosy again. Then it became not rosy. Then difficult.

And then things improved. After some struggles and some waiting, I began piecing parts together. I found a half-time job working as an editor at my old alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Now I spend every afternoon there editing grant proposals and research articles written by faculty members, and consulting on writing-related curricular issues.

Being able to have a job where the work comes to me, rather than my having to hunt for it, is an immense relief. It also gives me what a friend once called "institutional juice": health benefits, library access, gym access.

Most important, I have enough time left over to write, and more than half my monthly income comes from writing. I am writing about a broad array of topics for top newspapers and magazines. I am able to write about what interests me -- right now I'm on a jag about religion and technology and am fascinated with theories of social capital. Luckily I don't have to write articles about the fastest way to sexy abs, and I don't have to grind out stock reports (a job done increasingly by software, which I am also writing about).

I've traveled some, interviewing interesting people in various fields. And my work is getting read by millions of people, a thrill I'll never lose.

My most exciting news -- and the biggest sign that my business model is working -- is that my agent is shopping my proposal for a book about verbal blundering, tentatively titled Wonderful Blunderful. That's the goal I've been working toward: the opportunity to write about language and linguistics (which I studied in graduate school) for a mainstream audience.

My business model has allowed me to create continuities between what I studied as a graduate student and the issues of the day, between my doctoral expertise and my ex-academic identity. I have also realized something valuable about myself: I need to write for multiple audiences, and I want my writing to do multiple types of work in the world, from teaching to persuading to entertaining.

When I wrote on this site back in 2002, I boasted that former colleagues seemed to envy my path. "Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills," I wrote.

People still inquire, but I can't claim to know their motives. I'm too busy trying to keep this thing off the ground, to see how far I can go.

You can tell a lot about a profession by the fantasies of its members. Academics, I have found, secretly want to be freelance magazine writers. For a long time, while I worked on my doctorate in English, I suspected as much. But once I became a journalist myself, I attracted sotto voce confessions. They want my job.

Does this mean they want the financial risk, the rejection, and the uncertainties of the market? Of course not. They do, however, want the romance of writing, the freedom of freelancing. Some of my friends from graduate school, now safe in tenure-track jobs, tell me they wish they knew how to write, because they want their ideas consumed out of love, not obligation, and they want their research to matter in the world. I understand that perfectly well. That's why I do what I do.

Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills. And when I interview academic experts for a story, inevitably I hear about their desires to write for magazines, usually the ones they have sitting on their coffee tables. I don't extract such confessions; they're freely offered. I feel like the nun in Don Delillo's White Noise, who maintains the trappings of her faith so that her secular, cynical contemporaries are freed from belief.

Perhaps the biggest surprise came in a conversation I had with my dissertation supervisor more than a year ago. It started out as a debriefing on my experience on the academic job market in 2000, right after I defended and graduated. That year I had some interviews at the Modern Language Association, a follow-up phone interview, and an invitation for an on-campus visit, which I had turned down. After five years of teaching while I wrote my dissertation, I needed a break, and I didn't want to move to the hinterlands of Colorado, even if you could cross-country ski to class.

And more than anything else, I wanted to write. I was taking a risk, financially and psychologically, but I felt I couldn't stand in a writing class and encourage students to stretch their language, play with ideas, and put their personal investments on the line if I hadn't done so myself, and for stakes that really mattered. I didn't want to be a hypocrite.

I told my dissertation supervisor all the news, then described what I was doing. "Just hang in there," she said. "You can go out again next year. Something will turn up, I'm sure."

"But I really like what I'm doing," I told her. I was learning to battle the learning curve in areas far from my own expertise; I was becoming professionally curious, and national magazines were paying me for it. I also had an agent in New York City, who was encouraging, even if only mildly so. It was all penury and industry, as a friend put it, but I was traveling, reading widely, and meeting people. And I hadn't abandoned my dissertation topic, either -- an editor was interested in a piece about the future of linguistics.

"I don't know if I want to go back on the job market," I told her. "I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing."

She paused. "Well," she said, "I've always had a fantasy about myself as a freelance writer. You know, go out there and be able to write whatever you want."

As a graduate student, you keep so much under wraps about yourself, for fear that if anyone found out, your professional credibility would be lost, particularly if that person had the power to dictate the shape of the rest of your life. She knew that I wrote, but she considered it a hobby, I thought. Suddenly I realized: I was a threat.

I remembered the time I gave her a photocopy of my short story that the North American Review had published. For some reason I thought that academic colleagues spread the happiness of publication with each other, so I scribbled a note of appreciation to her on the top of the story and gave it to her.

She took the story. Her eyes flashed over it. "What's this?" she asked. Eventually she managed a look of mild pleasure, but I never found out the reason for her restrained reaction. Perhaps this wasn't protocol after all. Or maybe, as a graduate student, I didn't quite count as a colleague yet. Once I heard her secret fantasy, however, I had a better idea. Was she restraining her envy?

All these confessions are not simply cases of greener grass, I believe. Instead it's a symptom of a delirium that's endemic to the profession, particularly in the humanities. Only now do I see it clearly. It's a version of that deep need that crops up among academics, the need to prove that what one does is relevant in the world. It's a fear that what one spends all one's time doing does not, in the end, matter.

In that sense, the rhetoric of the "public intellectual" and the "intellectual entrepreneur" is one way that academics try to professionalize this fear. They do not acknowledge the fear, and they do not conquer it. They merely paper it over.

And what academics do not know is that journalists have a similar fantasy, except it works in reverse. As I've met more journalists and other news-media types, they express surprise that I would actually leave the academy. A fellow magazine writer once asked me, Why would you leave something you're good at? Some journalists I've talked to want to teach someday, to see an audience face-to-face, to change them, to really have an impact on the future. And to be able to write and study one topic in-depth for the rest of your life? Now that's a job I'd like to have.

Ten years from now, jokey newspaper articles about corporate follies will mention why the Chevy Nova didn't sell in Latin America, the hilarity that ensued when company names (e.g., Pen Island) became URLs, and how Google waded into the mighty river of language one day and drowned.

Google has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. According to Michael Krantz on the Google blog, they still think that saying something like "I googled it" is acceptable if it's the alternative to "I looked it up on Google." If you used some other search engine, however, "google" as a verb is "bad. Very, very bad," writes Krantz. "You can only 'Google' on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to 'search' on Yahoo or any other search engine."

Pardon me if I don't feel chastised for googling on yahoo. I'd rather celebrate and encourage the linguistic process that turns a name into a verb, and I think Google should too. Here's why.

To read the full story, go here.