Slang

What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook? "Social notworking." A steeply devalued retirement account? "201(k)." A painfully obsolete cellphone? "Brickberry." These linguistic dispatches from the land of cooler-than-you come courtesy of wit-mongers Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-headquartered full-service agency with a tidy billion dollars in annual billables.

After all those years of slinging hash and refilling coffee mugs, May Pare found herself \o7up to her eyeballs \f7in a collection of sayings that would \o7blow the mind \f7of someone trying to learn English. They were the likes \o7of pay through the nose, using elbow grease, having a hollow leg \f7and \o7being lower than a snake's belly.\f7 There were \o7heads will roll, press the flesh \f7and \o7keeping your eyes peeled\f7.

It is presidential language that would make Harry S. Truman blanch -- not for its saltiness but, heck, for just the opposite. On a daily basis, sometimes several times an hour, the word "heck" creeps into President Bush's public pronouncements. People he wants to praise, as well as places, ideas and winning sports teams, are all told that they are or have done a "heck" of a good thing.

Sometimes a single English word can't quite capture the essence of a particular moment or feeling -- that \o7je ne sais quois\f7 -- but logophile Adam Jacot de Boinod has combed through the dictionaries and dialects of more than 254 languages to find a few foreign words and phrases that work in a pinch when the lingua franca fails. He showcases his collection of interesting words from around the world in the new book "The Meaning of Tingo" and its companion website (www.themeaningoftingo.com).

IN the early morning hours most weekends, finding hyphy isn't difficult, it's just a matter of knowing what to look for. Pull off Interstate 580 near the San Leandro line and head south toward the San Francisco Bay. Along a nearly deserted stretch of Foothill Boulevard you'll find them: scorched black curlicues marking the street every hundred yards or so for nearly 10 miles.

If you're a hospital patient and a doctor refers to you as a "rock," it's probably not a compliment. But try not to take offense if a nurse mutters "SOB" in describing your condition. Those are just two examples of the common slang and shorthand that reveal one of medicine's little secrets: Doctors and nurses gossip just like anyone else, and they're not above gossiping about the patients they serve. Some of the jargon is harmless or even useful; for instance, "SOB" usually is an acronym for shortness of breath.

Do you know any of these phrases: "think of England," "a gun in your pocket," "go nuclear," "rough and tumble," "knock-down, drag-out" or "at the drop of a hat"? Do you know what it means to "go to the mattresses"? It's no skin off my nose if you don't. There's no doubt that great American cliches are, well, cliches. Whether we speak in street slang or have a broad, beautiful vocabulary, we all use little bits of language that come from another time and place. However you like to talk, it can be funny and fun to discover the origins of classic phrases and what popularized them.

Ilan STAVANS is uniquely qualified to ponder the meaning of words and the many-splendored pleasures to be found in dictionaries, as he does in this fascinating collection of essays. A Mexican Jew whose ancestors came from Poland and Ukraine, Stavans has devoted his career as an academic and author to negotiating his way through the dense thicket of language across different cultures. Stavans, who is the Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College, may well be one of the few writers who could have both supervised the publication of Library of America's three-volume series of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories and written a book about Spanglish.

Thursday is Bastille Day -- or le 14 Juillet, as it's known in France. For me, that's cause to think about French food. And to bemoan the fact that my husband and son and I won't be going to France this summer as usual to visit my in-laws, who are obsessed with the stuff. It's tough for me to get it into my zucchini that we don't have enough sorrel to go this year. Our rear ends aren't exactly surrounded by noodles. Zucchini? Sorrel? Noodles? Well, that's how French people talk.

Now and then the words "nifty" or "groovy" might drop into a conversation, instantly identifying the speaker as an old fogy or, worse, an old hippie. But the word "cool" doesn't do that. "Cool" is constant. As a modifier, as the modified, as a noun and as a verb, "cool" has withstood the fleeting nature of most slang. What is the reason for "cool's" longevity? That's an easy question for Keith Covington, jazz expert and owner of the New Haven Lounge in Baltimore.