People don't generally make a big to-do about 238th anniversaries, but I'd like to make an exception. One of the highlights of my reading life this year has been a book about an event that took place 238 years ago this Christmas: George Washington's crossing of the Delaware to take on the British in New Jersey, and thereby to change the course of the Revolutionary War.

The book, the aptly titled "Washington's Crossing," by David Hackett Fischer, taught me a lot about Washington and his world, but I'm mentioning it here because of Fischer's discussion of how "condescending" Washington was.

Come again?

OK, that's not quite how Fischer puts it, although Washington clearly was one of our less huggable presidents.

Fischer writes,

"Washington had been taught to treat people of every rank with civility and 'condescension,' a word that has changed its meaning in the modern era. In Washington's world, to condescend was to treat inferiors with decency and respect while maintaining a system of inequality."

The word has changed its meaning, because we've changed our minds (our collective mind?) about the thing or quality or action it describes. Uncomfortable as we are today with the notions of social hierarchy, we are unlikely to be comfortable with terms used to describe ways of negotiating it smoothly.

But "condescend" we might say today, was the "progressive" position of the time, the classy way for a patrician to behave, when he quite literally got down from his high horse to speak with hoi polloi at their own level. (There's a whole discussion about gentlemen on horseback contrasted with peons, literally those on foot. The Spanish word for "gentleman" is "caballero," literally a man on horseback.) Washington was an aristocrat for whom the choices, evidently, were arrogance and condescension. He chose condescension.

Conversely, when Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, got a bit bristly in a meeting with journalists a few weeks ago, the headline was, "Sun boss saddles up high horse." It was not written in admiration.

"Patronizing" has a similarly mixed background. The noun "patron" derives ultimately from the Latin word "pater," father, and is connected to ideas of "defender," "protector," and even "patron saint." (Think angels with flaming words.) But the verb "patronize," which can mean quite simply "to be a regular customer of" a business or merchant, has a more negative connotation as well: "to be kind or helpful to, but in a haughty or snobbish way, as if dealing with an inferior," as Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, puts it. Once you get your head around "haughty kindness" and "snobbishly helpful," you can consider the adjective "patronizing," which is always a put-down: "I can't stand your patronizing attitude every time I try to improve myself."

Residents of a town are often encouraged to "patronize local merchants," who presumably welcome the business. The existence of such a campaign is often a sign that said merchants are, or are felt to be, in some kind of trouble, however.

Another term related to "pater" is "paternalistic," which describes a management style that has known ups and downs over the years. I suspect there was a time – through the middle of the last century – when "paternalistic" described the enlightened approach, with guaranteed pensions and gold watches, but also rules to "protect" workers, especially women and minorities. Many companies today may speak of themselves as "a family," but employees are not happy to be treated as "children."

It's a phenomenon I've been following out of the corner of my eye for some time, but two articles side by side on our op-ed page one day this week brought it front and center: "Community" is everywhere.

One article blasted Fox Television for its planned reality show about adoption:

"[I]t would be hard to exaggerate the level of near-uniform disgust and outrage they have engendered within the diverse segments of the adoption community – a potential audience of tens of millions."

Tens of millions? I hadn't ever thought of an entity called "the adoption community," but if its "population" is in the tens of millions, it's on par with some of the largest of the 50 United States.

The page-mate for this piece was an article about security for members of "international aid community" operating in places like Afghanistan. This "community" lacks the numbers of the "adoption community" but makes up for them in reach – spread thinly as butter on Melba toast – around the globe.

"Community" may be four Latin-derived syllables long, but it's a wonderfully broad umbrella term that covers just about every kind of human settlement: cities and towns as well as villages, urban and rural. The adoption community and the aid community are different – they're communities of interest, organized around a particular subject.

"Community" can also be a convenient way to avoid speaking of "camps" or "sides" in a dispute. Analysts of the conflict in Northern Ireland, for instance, have often found it easier to speak of the nationalist and unionist "communities."

I see a couple of things going on here. I see more people claiming status as a "community," either for themselves or on behalf of others, in part because "community" is such a convenient umbrella term; but also because people are concerned, consciously or otherwise, that "community" may be endangered. And I see people claiming "membership" in these communities – even in phrases that seem slightly ridiculous if you think too deeply about them, such as "members of the homeless community."

I'm struck by how often I see references to individuals as "members" of some larger entity. We speak of someone as "a member of the cast," or "a member of the faculty," rather than simply "in the cast" or "on the faculty." Watch for this pattern and you'll see it everywhere. I did it myself just a few paragraphs north of here, in the reference to "members of the aid community."

I'm not sure just what this means, but "cast member" turns out to be the term the Disney theme parks use to describe their employees. It's easy to see why it works for them – it connotes performance, teamwork, and belonging – and, while we're at it, "let's pretend."

Do we talk so much about community because we're afraid it's endangered?

It could be. I find myself wondering whether what I think of as the Bruegel Paradox is at work here.

Several years ago I went to see an exhibition of paintings by the Bruegel family, Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. The show made the point that they painted their charming scenes of peasant life not because such scenes were everywhere around them, but because they were becoming rare enough, with the advance of urbanization and modernity, to attract their artistic notice.

So it is with "community": It may be that we use the word everywhere because nowhere do we feel we have enough of it. And we keep talking about "membership" because we all want to belong.

Since the Monitor ran the "Ramadan Diary" series this fall, I've become more aware of the new moon each month: Ramadan begins and ends with a new moon, and our Saudi stringer kept track of her weeks of fasting by watching the phases of the moon.

The same moon shines on Boston, too, and I've been noticing the new moon floating over Symphony Hall, as a silver sliver in the darkening blue evening sky as I drive home from work. Each day the sliver is a bit less slender. This is what is known as a waxing crescent. "Crescent" means "increasing," and these two words (from the Latin crescere, "to come forth," have cousins in the word "create" and its relatives.

Would that all metaphors for "increase" were as simple as the phases of the moon: It gets bigger, or it gets smaller. Lunar imagery doesn't drag in tangled metaphors of lighter-than-air craft, ballistics, or explosives.

Here in newspaperland, we're always in the market for more metaphors for increase, for growth, for having more of something. Not to give away any trade secrets or anything, but news reporting is often a matter of noticing what we seem to have more of (traffic, terrorism, cellphones, iPods) than we used to, and writing about that. (There is also a school of journalism focused on what we have less of – time, cheap oil, cellphone-free public spaces, civilized conversation – than we used to: Call it the waning moon school of reporting.)

It is on the waxing crescent side that we tend to get into trouble, however. We tend to equate "more" with "up," e.g., "Stuff costs more" = "Prices go up." And then the "up" metaphor takes on a life of its own – achieves liftoff, so to speak.

"Housing prices soar" is such a familiar turn of phrase that most people probably don't register it as a figure of speech anymore – although I'm just literal enough that it conjures up an image of hang gliders with big black numbers ("$275,000," "$675,000," "$2.3 mil or B.O.") painted on them, way up in the sky.

From numbers – e.g., prices – going up or down, we quickly move to things themselves going up or down. Thus not long ago this newspaper reported, "Households with five or more people have fallen by half since '70." I suspect we meant to say "the percentage of households…"

"Skyrocket," as a verb, is another vivid verb whose trajectory sometimes escapes the force of both Earth's gravity and logic. "Skyrocket" is what numbers of feral pigs in East Texas were recently reported to have done – although to be fair, I should stress that it was the numbers, and not the pigs themselves, that were said to have taken flight. Similarly, smoking in the movies is reported to have "skyrocketed." An increase in adultery in China was described in our pages this week thus: "Extramarital relations have skyrocketed."

But "explode" may – how shall I put it? – pack even more of a punch than "skyrocket." It's widely used, especially with regard to markets. This is unfortunate given how many times, alas, the news media have to report on an actual bomb in an actual market where people are shopping for food.

Nonetheless, in a dope-sheet on "how to improve your writing," readily available on the Web from one of our fine state universities, the following sentence appears: "Fortunately, DandyCorp. invested in chicken necks just before the poultry market exploded." The sentence is meant as an example of incorrect usage – failure to use the past perfect tense ("had invested"). But if you can read that bit without its bringing up a mental image of feathers flying everywhere, you're a better person than I am. (Maybe there really is a subject called "Ag English.")

My favorite, though, is from a commodities trading publication: "Cocoa exploded higher yesterday morning and left a massive gap on the daily charts."

Beware the mad chocolate bomber!

The dramatic events in Ukraine have been unfolding remarkably peacefully so far, praise be. But the good ship Monitor has taken a few shots across the bow from readers unhappy with our spelling of the name of the country's capital.

We write it "Kiev"; some of our Ukrainian-Canadian readers want to see "Kyiv." What's all this about?

Kiev, these readers note, is the Russian name for the city; Kyiv, they insist, is the "correct" Ukrainian spelling.

Well, wait a minute, folks. There's spelling, and there's transliteration. The difference between Stephen and Steven, or Sara and Sarah, is one of spelling.

But rendering a Chinese or an Arabic name, for instance, into English, involves transliteration – literally "cross-lettering." One has to decide how to represent the different sounds of the foreign language using letters of the Roman, or Latin, alphabet, which English uses.

For Chinese names appearing in English, so-called Pinyin spelling, adopted by the Chinese government in 1979, is the standard. When Chinese leader Hu Jintao commits news, his name makes headlines spelled the same way pretty much throughout the Roman alphabet world. The transliteration of Arabic names, on the other hand, is all over the lot, partly because the pronunciation of the language varies widely across the many different countries where Arabic is spoken. Thus the Monitor has reported recently about Fallujah, while The New York Times has been reporting about Falluja, and the Los Angeles Times has covered an assault on a place called Fallouja.

Russian and Ukrainian both use Cyrillic rather than Roman letters. The languages are similar but distinct, and the Ukrainians, in particular, are eager to keep reminding us all of the distinctions. Looking over one of the alphabetical tables I've found online, and trying to reproduce the sounds as presented by the little audio clips it presents, I get a sense of Ukrainian as a kinder, gentler cousin of Russian, with many of the sounds designated as "softer" than their Russian counterparts.

A new system for Romanizing Ukrainian was introduced in 1996, and that's the system that has given the world Kyiv.

Is it time for a change? It's a question news organizations are continually asking themselves about countries going through major political or cultural change. Here at the Monitor, we generally steer a middle course. A line from Alexander Pope keeps coming to mind: "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

At some level the question is, "How is this place known in the English-speaking world?" After all, we say "Munich," not "München," and "Milan," not "Milano" – and "Moscow," for that matter, rather than "Moskva." A Google News search the other day came up with 24,000 hits for Kiev and 1,460 for Kyiv. So "Kiev" still represents the mainstream, if perhaps not the forward edge. Yes, it's a transliteration of the Russian name for the place. But if that's how it's known, why not call it that?

A newspaper sometimes has to balance political correctness with terms that will have some meaning for the readers it is trying to reach. If the one thing that a vast swath of readers know about Ukraine is that there's a fancy chicken dish named for its capital, do we really want to insist on Kyiv and lose them completely?

But here's the zinger: If you're trying to mimic the way actual Ukrainians pronounce the name of their capital, the 1996 transliteration isn't much help. English spelling is seldom a reliable pronunciation guide. Both "i" and "y" can represent "short" and "long" sounds. But what neither letter naturally represents to English speakers is the actual Ukrainian sound, a so-called "middle vowel" that simply doesn't exist in English. If "Kyiv" were a product being test marketed to the English-speaking world, that spelling – that name! – wouldn't survive the first focus group.

I called up a professor of Slavic studies I know in Ottawa and asked hopefully, "Isn't that sound fairly close to the 'o' with an umlaut of German?" (That is a sound that, in this holiday season, English-speaking choral groups are struggling to get right to be able to sing "O Du Fröhliche" and the like.)

"Right street, wrong house," he replied.

What the "y" in Kyiv does approximate pretty well is the letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet used to represent its counterpart in Ukrainian, a letter that looks like a backward capital N. (Are you still with me?)

It's interesting that the Ukrainian community in Canada seems to be among those leading the charge to adopt the 1996 Romanization in the English-language press. I can't help thinking that multicultural, officially bilingual Canadians know a thing or two about the role of spelling in the politics of identity. They have, after all, a few "favourite" spelling tricks to distinguish themselves from a powerful "neighbour" next door, whom they have to keep chequing, er, checking, up on.

But here's one well-meaning editor's plea: Dear Ukrainians, please don't make it hard for us to tell your story.

Listening to how English is changing sometimes means keeping an ear cocked for what's no longer being said, for words that are falling out of the language.

"Must" may be one of these – falling out of American English, at least.

This thought came to me a few weeks ago when a colleague and I were trying to repair a bit of someone's prose. We considered inserting the word "must" to correct the problem when it suddenly struck me how old-fashioned "must" sounded, and not the right word for that writer's voice.

At this point I felt some research coming on. A quick trip to Google News (which as regular readers of Verbal Energy know is a favorite search engine for gathering usage data that is up to the minute but also has been filtered through professional copy editors) showed 144,000 hits for "must." That suggests the word isn't ready for the ash heap of history yet.

With its four-letter monosyllabic brevity, "must" is beloved of headline writers everywhere. "Must" is certainly alive and well in editorial and opinion columns. Is it unfair to note, though, that editorial and opinion pages are not exactly crowded with representatives of – how shall we put it – the iPod and body-piercing demographic, and therefore may not express the forward edge of contemporary usage?

Whatever. Countless gallons of ink and tons of newsprint are being devoted to articulating what Condoleezza Rice must do as secretary of state, what Kofi Annan must do at the United Nations, etc. Note the pattern here: People telling other people what they must do. It sounds so imperative.

What's going on here? I'm inclined to think that we're all feeling less "behooved," somehow, less as if we "must" do this or that. Similarly, subjunctive constructions ("I insist that he come here at once") nowadays sound a tad schoolmistressy. Or is that schoolmasterish? Schoolmasterful? Schoolmasterly? Whatever. People often just don't get it. In fact one place "must" frequently appears is in sentences where it's not needed at all. Thus an article on private mortgage insurance, in a publication of one of the Federal Reserve banks says,

"This provision also requires that the borrower must be current on the payments required by the terms of the mortgage."

The "must" isn't needed; "requires that the borrower be current" suffices.

The usage that does seem to be relatively rare coming out of an American mouth is "I must." My Google News search of that exact phrase brought up a mere 5,210 hits. As I worked my way through the list of hits, sorted by Google’s busy Web spiders for "relevance," I was struck by the preponderance of non-US English. It also struck me that when an American used the phrase, it was often in a rather formal context. A father writing in an online journal described, in the present tense, going through a difficult moment with his teenage son:

"In those seconds many thoughts and questions flash through my mind and heart: I must respond lovingly. I must assure him that he is loved."

Where "I must" seems more natural in unscripted conversation is in the set phrases "I must say" or "I must tell you," as Tom Ridge, the departing secretary of homeland security, said at his press conference this week,

You know, I had a difficult time talking to my leadership this morning, I must tell you, because they're an incredible group of people.

The idiom that is taking over for "must" is "to have to (do something)," and my Google News search for "have to" (with the quotation marks to ensure a search for the exact phrase) brought up 283,000 hits – not all of them, admittedly, direct replacements for "must" constructions. (There's another construction, the clunkier "I've got to do" this or that, but let's not go there now.)

As "have to" has taken over for "must," it has gained in urgency. And note how its pronunciation has changed. "I have to have this done by noon" is pronounced as if it were, "I hafta have this done…" The two "haves" are pronounced differently – and doesn't the first sound more intense? A phonetician would describe it as the difference between the voiced ("v" sound) and unvoiced ("f" sound) labiodental fricative, but let's not go there, either.