When I as an editor have to talk with people about what's wrong with their prose, as occasionally happens, I often have to trot out some very scary terminology, such as "dangling participle" or "subordinating conjunction," or "faulty parallelism."

It's sometimes enough to prompt a twinge of envy within me at people laboring in fields where the tools have simpler names, like "rake" or "hoe" or "shovel" or even "spade." It's always great to be able to call a spade a spade.

And so I was thrilled a few years ago to discover that fellow wordsmiths use the simple straightforward terms "mass noun" and "count noun" to distinguish between, well – to distinguish between "stuff" and "things." "Stuff" is a mass noun. You may have more or less stuff, but there isn't a plural, as there is with "thing": If you have more than one thing you have "things." Since "things" can be individually counted, "thing" is a count noun.

The mass vs. count distinction is perhaps less clear for newer terms whose usage is somewhat in flux. You wouldn't say "a stuff," but you're likely to say "an e-mail," even though some would insist that "e-mail" is a mass noun and that the correct way to refer to an individual item within this mass is as "an e-mail message." After all, the traditionalists say, you get "mail" consisting of individual "letters." You wouldn't say, "I got a mail from him today." But I’m not sure time is on their side.

(It's perhaps worth noting here how many synonyms we have for letters – for snail mail, or postal mail, as we now say: letter, note, card, epistle, brief, billet-doux, missive. E-mail is just e-mail; at a stretch, some people would say "message" or "note.")

The mass vs. count distinction matters in terms of articles ("an e-mail" or not), and the often prickly distinction between "less" and "fewer." "Less" goes with mass nouns, "fewer" with count nouns. That's why grammar vigilantes like to see signs that say "10 Items or Fewer," rather than "10 Items or Less," at the checkout lanes of the supermarket. (The rest of us just want to know the people ahead of us have no more than 10 items.)

Some nouns are both mass and count: hair, for instance: He has less hair than he used to have, but he still has a few stray hairs on his coat. "Money" is a mass noun that sometimes turns into a count noun, with a plural "monies," which seems to be favored by politicians trying to demonstrate how much they have brought to their constituents. The plural makes it sound more abundant.

"Spam," in the computer sense – unwanted e-mail, or, to be really formal, unwanted e-mail messages – seems to be acquiring a plural form, in some quarters at least.

I'm seeing a trend from mass to count. I think it reflects, in part, the commoditization of mass (communal) goods into items packaged and sold individually. "Do you want more coffee?" one spouse, carafe in hand, asks the other in the kitchen. Coffee is a mass noun in that context. But at the deli, it becomes a count noun: "I need two coffees, an orange juice, and a hot chocolate," says the desk jockey provisioning his colleagues during the morning break. Each of those individual items will, of course, have a price.

There's another important example of a noun morphing – definitively – from "mass" to "count," and that's "chad," the little bits of pasteboard liberated when a punch card is punched. Anyone whose knowledge of "chad" predated the 2000 presidential election knows that it used to be "stuff," the dandruff of the early computer era. Not until the Bush vs. Gore race in Florida did the noun come back into wide use, acquiring a plural along the way. No, they weren't actually counting chads, but the state of the individual bit of chad on a punch-card ballot was a factor in how the ballot would be tabulated. We could say that at a time of mass confusion, chads had become a "count" noun in the fullest sense of the word.

A frequent reader of Verbal Energy has e-mailed me to take the Monitor to task for failure to observe the usual distinction between "farther" and "further."

The former is traditionally used to refer to physical distance, the other to degree: Out on a day hike, for instance, one might ask, "Shall we stop for lunch here, or walk along a little farther?"

And after a difficult conversation, you might report to a friend, "I tried to ask him more about his plans for succession, but he refused to discuss the matter any further."

So far, so good. But what about metaphorical distance? "I'd like to take that argument a step further." Yes, further, not farther, is the word copy editors, English teachers, curmudgeons in training, and other sticklers would use. But is there not a case for seeing "step" as indicating distance rather than degree – rather as if the "argument" were a guest at one's garden party and one were walking him/her down the path past the chrysanthemums?

I have a thesis that so many people do so much "virtually" nowadays that they lose a grip on the distinction between what's literal and what's figurative. New technologies have certainly helped us along the path to abstraction. Does "sending an chapter to the printer" mean delivering a manuscript to a guy in an apron, who has his sleeves rolled up and a pencil behind his ear? Or does it mean hitting a button on a computer?

But it's not just technology – gizmos and gadgets that perform work that people once did. It's that people lose track of the way language reflects the concrete physical realities of the human experience. Take the word "respiration," for instance. It's a straight-ahead term for breathing, for inhaling and exhaling. But its near cousins, "inspiration" and "expiration," have been largely lost to abstraction. We've largely forgotten their connection to breathing. We forget about that "breathing in" that precedes an inspired (in both senses) musical phrase from a singer, or the spoken cadence of a debater or a preacher; and we associate "expiration" mostly with credit cards and canned goods in the pantry.

On the other hand, when we say something like, "Johnny Damon's grand slam in the second inning was truly breathtaking," we're using a figure of speech strongly rooted in the way people actually respond to extraordinary events – they actually do catch their breath.

The history of the word "worry" illustrates the kind of migration from the concrete, physical, and literal realm to the abstract, mental, and figurative. It derives from an Old English word meaning "to strangle," and is rooted in the notion of twisting; "worm" is an etymological kin. Examples of its most concrete meaning of harassing, or picking at, or on, are "a dog worrying a bone" or someone "worrying the loose tooth with his tongue." From this concrete meaning come more general notions of being vexed, annoyed, distressed. But if you consider that to say, for instance, "I'm worried by all the changes in my community," is to acknowledge that you are letting your concern chew on you, as a dog chews on a bone, you may be inclined to get a grip and stop worrying.

In his book about the evolutionary development of consciousness in human beings, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," Julian Jaynes described how language has evolved to reflect the changes in human beings' mental processes over time, as (to oversimplify greatly) mental activity jas come to predominate over physical activity.

Jaynes also used the expression "spatialization of time" to describe a mental process of translating time into space – a process essential to being able to plan for the future. It sounds grand but it's something we do all the time with calendars, in which each page represents a month or a week or a day. We rearrange our future by moving appointments around as if we were moving the queen across the chessboard.

This translation of time into space has become ingrained into the way we think. Take oil prices – please! (as Henny Youngman would have said). We take for granted that they go "up" or "down" (admittedly, mostly "up" lately). But they don't really. Oil costs more or less. "Up" and "down" really reflect a graphical convention for expressing prices over time on what's known as a fever-line chart: Y price over X time. And when the trajectory (another metaphor!) of that fever line expresses a sharp course upward into the northeast quadrant of the chart, we say "Prices are skyrocketing!" And when they fall from their peak, and then fall again, we say that they have fallen further rather than farther – because we know a real mountain when we see it, and this isn't it.

An observation during the closing weeks of this current presidential campaign: What a rich vocabulary the English language has for suggesting – without explicitly saying – that someone is lying.

That's "lying" as in "fibbing." Saying things that aren't so. Telling falsehoods with the intent to deceive. Practicing mendacity. Indulging in willful obfuscation. Prevarication. See what I mean?

"Lie," as a noun or a verb, is such a little word: a single syllable consisting of a liquid consonant and a diphthong – to use the phonetician's term for what we referred to in school as the "long i." The related noun, "liar," is almost as brief, one more unstressed syllable with another liquid consonant, "r," which in some dialects isn't even pronounced.

"Liar" is the kind of word one can utter under one's breath, or even let slip involuntarily.

And yet it is a deeply emotive word. A liar is what we are taught early on not to be. It's also a word we're taught to be very careful with in applying to others. And yet so many in the public square are being so selective with so-called "facts" that we're all starting to develop elaborate vocabularies to hold politicians and their spinmeisters to account without using the "L" word.

Politicians dare not hurl charges of "Liar, liar, pants on fire" across the partisan divide willy-nilly. Readers and viewers expect the mainstream media (is that term beginning to sound quaint or what?) to show "respect" for an incumbent president. Then the news organizations, in the interest of nonpartisanship, extend that courtesy to presidential challengers. (Chatroom types, talk-show callers-in, and for that matter most bloggers, have no such inhibitions, however – and no advertisers or corporate shareholders to please either).

There's a paradox at work here: intense polarization across an ideological spectrum that, in mainstream American politics, is fairly narrow. And all this polarization happens in a system that includes no mechanism for the head of government, the president, to face direct questions regularly from the public or their representatives, as a prime minister does during regular "question time " in parliament. Presidential press conferences are about as close as the American system gets to this, and they aren't very close.

The debates have provided abundant opportunity for parsing the nuances of mendacity, or what we might call accuracy deficits – such as the audio fact-checking that NPR offered after Wednesday night's debate. "Stretching the truth" is a locution that has been getting a workout of late: "Both Kerry and Bush stretched the truth at times," as The Washington Post and other papers reported. (Gotta love those "fair and balanced" headlines.)

"Exaggeration" is another useful item in the political lexicon. It's polysyllabic, as a lot of these fudge words are. This helps soften them, because even smart people have to think for a nanosecond about what they mean. And because you can't exaggerate something that isn't there in the first place, to decry an opponent's comment as an "exaggeration" is to concede that it has a nub of truth - not an utter lie. Presumably none of this, however, was going through the mind of President Bush Wednesday night when he denounced as an exaggeration the claim that he wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden.

There's another idiom apparently more common in British than American English, "to be economical with the truth." Here's something from the online edition of the British movie magazine Empire: "I've not seen the press coverage today, but I'll bet the pro-Kerry papers have a picture of Bush looking goofy and the pro-Bush papers have a picture of Kerry looking shifty, both of which prove the camera can, and does, lie all the time. Well, if not lie, at least be 'economical with the truth."

(Note: "I've not seen." An American would have said "I haven't seen.")

"Mislead" is an interesting stealth proxy for "lie." Because it's often used to refer to giving someone an inadvertent bum steer ("I may have misled you when I told you that store is open late on Thursdays; I hear they've just changed their hours"), it's much "softer" than "lie." But it contains the suggestion of "leading badly," which has particular zing when directed at a politician. But this can backfire when overused, especially by another politician. "Senator Kerry, Why Are You Always 'Misled?' " is the headline on one conservative rant, er, commentary out there. Note to politicians, actual and aspiring, everywhere: Be careful about letting yourself become the subject of a passive verb.

There's a joke about a retiring sea captain who tells his successor, "There's one critical bit of information that's really the secret to running the ship. It's on a slip of paper in the upper right hand drawer of your new desk." The new captain opens the drawer and finds the slip. On it he reads, "Port is left. Starboard is right."

Through this election season I've been clinging to a similarly critical bit of information: "Red states go Republican. Blue states go Democratic."

I think I'm not the only one. Newbies on the political circuit have been talking "red" and "blue" as if the colors had been assigned after a coin toss between Jefferson and Adams. But this is really only the second presidential cycle in which the phrases "red states" and "blue states" have crystallized into an accepted shorthand. Time was when one could flip the dial, as we used to say, on election night and see different color schemes on different network maps. In 1992, the networks settled on red for Bill Clinton and blue for George H. W. Bush. By 2000 they had – dare I say it – flip-flopped, and the victories of the scion of the House of Bush were colored red.

Not everybody finds the new standard color coding completely intuitive. One has to resort to little mnemonics: Republicans go for red meat and Democrats go for blue cheese? Hmm. Well, the putdown lines for privileged liberals have generally referred to brie, not blue. But at least they both start with "B."

Maybe the simplest thing is to etch in thought, "'R=red=Republicans," and let the Democrats have the one that's left over.

Part of the problem here is that red, as a political color, is seriously oversubscribed. It's the royal red of George III's Redcoats during the American Revolution and of Royal Mail postboxes in Britain today. But it also is – was? – the color of the Communist Party, and the left generally. The slogan "Better dead than red" was not a comment on the House of Windsor. On the other hand, royal red isn't the color that comes to mind to associate with the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Blue is also subject to competing claims, however. If Democrats are blue, it might be by association with the blue-collar shirts of union members, traditionally a strong constituency of the party. But blue is also the color of the trust-me suits of the business class, widely expected to vote Bush-Cheney this fall.

Blue is traditionally a liberal color. The colors of the Liberal International – the international federation of liberal (i.e., centrist, free-market, nonsectarian) parties – are medium blue and yellow. National flag colors tend to trump ideological hues, though, as I discovered during the Canadian federal elections of 2000, when my Toronto neighborhood erupted in lawn signs promoting the local Liberal candidates – in Maple Leaf red rather than liberal blue.

Their counterparts in Germany, aka the Free Democrats, cheerfully use the blue and yellow team colors rather than national flag colors. This lets German headline writers occasionally use the term "Ampelkoalition" ("traffic-light coalition") to refer to governments made up of Social Democrats (red), Liberals (yellow), and Greens (green, obviously).

But no serious party in the United States would claim any colors other than red, white, and blue. I do seem to recall, however, that the Democrats, at their 1972 convention in Miami, opted for some subtle variations on these hues for the traditional bunting in the hall – heading in the direction of salmon, cream, and teal, to look better on television, reportedly. It all must have made for a good laugh at GOP headquarters.