Time, manner, place. Time, manner, place.

That was my mnemonic when, as I high school student, I struggled to learn the rules for ordering German adverbs and adverbial phrases. "I love in summer with you down the Rhein to sail." The time phrase ("in summer") is followed by indicators of manner ("with you") and place" ("down the Rhein").

It seemed utterly wrong. The only way through seemed to be to memorize the rules. Hmph! We don't have rules like this in English – or do we?

Hmm. Does the fact that this sounds so wrong in English suggest perhaps that there are rules there, too – just different from those of German? This thought appeared at my elbow and tugged at my sleeve.

In the years since, I've realized that this hunch was right. English and, I assume, other languages, are full of rules that no one teaches - not to native speakers anyway - but that everyone learns.

Take a sentence like this: "In the park today, we saw six gorgeous immaculately restored antique flame-red Italian racing cars." That's quite a string of adjectives, but they're placed in order according to a hierarchy that leaves "time, manner, place" in the dust.

This whole question was the focus of the Tip of the Week from the newsletter Copy Editor a couple of weeks ago. A reader had written in: "I deal with a lot of non-native English speakers, and a question frequently arises as to what order to use for a string of adjectives or adverbs. We (editors) know to say '21 large green tables' but why not 'green large 21 tables'? or '21 green large tables'? Is there a rule for this?" Wendalyn Nichols, editor of Copy Editor, responded, "There is indeed a standard order for adjectives, and you’ll find it described in dictionaries and textbooks for learners of English as a second language."

Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.

Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.

Seeing terms for age and national origin as essential seems at odds with the ethos of equal opportunity, but I'm stuck with this system for now at least, just was I was stuck with time, manner, place in German. And if these modifiers are in the right order (unlike, say, "young, angry man"), they need no commas.

I don't mean to sound cranky about commas. But too many of them together are sometimes an indication of prose not well thought through and not flowing gracefully enough.

Punctuation is form of signage. I'm not against signs. But an excess of signage in a public space such as an airport or a courthouse is often a sign of poor design, or an attempt to superimpose some kind of new order on the natural traffic flows of a building. ("This door is not an entrance.")

Similarly I find that if I calm down and reorder words, I can often avoid some punctuation. "His battered old canvas fishing hat" is the phrase usage expert Wilson Follett uses to demonstrate what he calls "superposed" adjectives. I think of them as layered adjectives. We start with "hat." "Fishing" tells you fundamentally what kind of hat this is. ("Purpose" in the taxonomy above.) "Canvas" is from the "material" column. "Old" represents the "age" column. "Battered" is a "quality" adjective on Nichols's hierarchy, or an "opinion" one on some others. ("Battered?" Whose hat are you calling "battered" anyway?) "His" is a determiner.

I had no idea I knew all these rules, but here they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we more careful with one another's words than we used to be? Could we - by which I mean those of us in the world of print publishing and its Web components - afford to lose some of the quotation marks we employ so freely and just take responsibility for using the words in our own editorial voice, without seeking to pin them on to others?

I was reminded of this longtime cluster of questions the other day when I was called in to consult on a piece that seemed a tad overpunctuated. It involved a stylized representation of the author's interior monologue, including references to a number of television shows. Their titles, which included a self-punctuating one, with its own question mark, each needed its own set of quotation marks.

The author had put the whole thing in quotes, and so the result was a cluttered sentence around which punctuation marks swarmed like insects around a streetlamp on a summer evening. My suggested fix was to take out a layer of punctuation – to lose the quotes around the whole interior monologue bit and let the question mark in one of the titles end the sentence.

Whew. Sometimes less really is more. The excised quotation marks can go back into their box and be called on later, when there's a need for them. There surely will be eventually.

These little marks that the British call "inverted commas" are the acrobats of the punctuation world, levitating from the bottom of the line of type to the top. They work singly; they work in pairs.

I sense that they're working harder nowadays for several reasons. In an age of more on-the-record official briefings, with cameras present, writers of all sorts have more opportunities for getting someone's exact words and fewer excuses for not having them. It's often easier for a reporter on deadline (is there any other kind?) to copy and paste a block of type from a press release posted online into a story rather than trying to make sense of handwritten notes on paper and try to fashion a coherent sentence that honestly represents the person's thoughts without making him or her sound like a doofus.

Sometimes even friends sharing bits of e-mail take this kind of cut-and-paste approach. Instead of paraphrasing someone's complicated directions to the cottage by the lake, for instance, why not just copy and paste? "Here's what Fred said about the route to take" is all the introduction that's needed.

A lot of conversation that used to be oral is written nowadays – instant messaging, texting, and of course e-mail. But even in live conversation, we have ways of signaling that we're using someone else's exact words, or nearly exact. It's not just the "quote, unquote" idiom; even those adolescent-sounding constructions with "like" represent a form of direct quotation: "I got in at three, and Dad was like, 'Where have you been?'"

And while we're in this neighborhood, let's not forget the convention of "air quotes" or "finger quotes."

In earlier centuries this function of "I am telling you exactly what the guy said" was handled by the now-quaint verb "quoth."

At the other end of the spectrum from the copy-and-paste block quote is the snippet quote. This is widely familiar, especially its subspecies, the strategic snippet. I know I'm not the only one to look at book jacket blurbs or movie ads to speculate on the original context of the hot words.

The ad calls the movie "amazing," for instance, and one suspects that the full quote would have been along the lines of, "Given how weak the story line is and how unappealing the main characters, that this movie ever made it to release is nothing short of amazing."

Snippet quotes, in an altogether more honorable version, are a hallmark of Zagat's restaurant reviews. Perhaps they use "so many" "little snippets" because they want to "remind" the "reader" that the "ratings" are based on the input of "lots and lots" of customers, and that broad base of inputs is one of the system's strengths. But it all gets a little bit cute, you know?

Not all snippet quotes are created equal. Quote marks are useful in highlighting readers' judgments and opinions. They're less so indicating phrases expressing simple facts. I'm not picking on Zagat. I'm trying to get at that point of taking responsibility for one's words as a writer or editor.

Take for example, a Zagat review of a restaurant where I have dined, and happily so. It praises the restaurant's "'adventurous,' 'seasonal' New American menu." Hmm. "Adventurous" is clearly a value judgment, and culinary adventure starts in different places for different people. My mother thought I was being adventurous to add oregano to her Shrimp Creole.

But "seasonal" is, or ought to be, a matter of fact. Either the chef goes from serious, fortifying brown things in winter to lighthearted, energizing green things in spring (I'm thinking of last night's pea soup here; forgive me) or she doesn't.

And you can quote me on that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well. Does that make it perfectly clear?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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