I know I'm supposed to be thinking about saffron since my visit last weekend to "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation in Central Park in New York.

But come on. The Gates are orange. Saffron, with all due respect, just doesn't hit people's buttons the way orange does.

The Gates have been a great public moment for New York City, as tens of thousands of residents and visitors have promenaded around them and through them. "Are they art, or are they just an event?" an artist friend asked me after I got back to Boston. An event, surely. Maybe choreography rather than just installation art: Christo and Jeanne-Claude have enticed us all into their conception. The public interaction is inherent in the art.

For those to whom the project does not appeal, however – and there they are, sounding off in the letters columns of the papers – the critical point often seems to be how they feel about orange. Those who like The Gates see them as providing a burst of color at a dead point in the year. Those who don't like them see them as "prison-jumpsuit orange" or "traffic-cone orange." Does orange signal excitement and energy – or aberration, disruption (roadworks ahead!), and danger?

Orange is a political color, too. Last fall we had the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Orange was picked as a mellow, golden harvest-time hue. Since then, democrats elsewhere in the former Soviet Union have been using orange as their team color.

A few thousand miles away, Lebanese rallying against Syria's occupation of their country this week have been widely described as following the Ukrainian model of peaceful protest. Their banners have been their own national colors of red and white, but when a political blogger speculated on the prospect of actually ousting the Syrians, "Orange in Beirut?" was all the headline he needed.

Orange has had a long political history in Western Europe, too, – and by extension in the New World. It's a color symbolism tied up in a particular kind of word play, in which a dynastic family name ("the House of Orange") happened to coincide with a new term for one of the basic seven of the rainbow.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation for orange the fruit (spelled "orenge") from 1044. Orange as the name of a color, however, didn't come on to the scene for several centuries after that. During the political upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries, however, orange became a natural pick for a team color.

The accidental coincidence of this name ["Orange" as in "House of"] with that of the fruit and colour … made the wearing of orange ribbons, scarfs, cockades, orange-lilies, etc., a symbol of attachment to William III, and to the principles of the Revolution settlement of 1689, and led to their use by the Orange lodges and Orangemen.

That is to say, by Irish Protestants, notably in today's Northern Ireland.

At the time when the princes of Orange were making names for themselves, the orange itself was a relatively recent arrival in Europe from India, where it is thought to have originated. In Spain (one of its stops along the way) the word for "orange" is "naranja." Somehow the initial "n" seems to have come unstuck as the word came into English; what should have been "a norange" became "an orange."

The United States has a number of truly citrus "oranges" – Orange County, California, as well as Orange County, Florida. But especially in the Northeast, "orange" as a town or street name is often an acknowledgment of Dutch or Irish heritage. The Orange Line on Boston's subway system, for instance, is so called because it used to run along Washington Street – which used to be known as Orange Street. Subtle, no?

In the beginning was the image.

What's that you say? Not quite right?

Oh, of course – in the beginning was the WORD.

But images – or icons, to use a hip Greek-derived synonym – have a lively role in our culture as not-words, as anti-words, as little bits of communication that work in places that actual words don't quite fit.

"Icon" is particularly on my mind in part because of a couple of big acquisitions in the telecoms field that have caught Wall Street's attention.

A couple of weeks ago, SBC, the onetime Baby Bell phone company, announced its plan to swallow up Ma Bell. Ed Whitacre, SBC's chairman, told reporters at the time that the acquisition would be a way of "preserving an American icon."

This week, Verizon announced its acquisition of MCI, a company that at least one talking head I listened to described as "an icon." Surely he had heard the Whitacre comment; perhaps this is becoming the standard praise for an entity that has played a great role but is now about to disappear.

Remembering that MCI went through a phase as "WorldCom," I might have thought another "image" term might be called for – "poster child," as in "poster child for corporate misdoings." As I write, former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers is on trial for the fraud that drove his company into bankruptcy in 2002. WorldCom's debacle was part of a wave of corporate megascandals that included the Enron collapse and the HealthSouth scandal. Hmm, is there a relationship between "icon" and "poster child"?

"Poster child" was, back when I was a child myself, the cute but needy kid pictured on a poster for some sort of fundraising drive (a latter-day version of Dickens's Tiny Tim, it has been suggested). More recently, "poster child" has come to be used ironically and negatively, as in a recent Slate article on allegedly xenophobic, protectionist Slovenia as "poster child for the new Europe."

With all this idolizing and iconizing, there are those who think we'd be better off with words than pictures; and some specialists are simply put off by the use of "icon" to mean anything other than an image of a "sacred or sanctified Christian personage," as in the Eastern Church. A professor friend reports that he has a Russian colleague aggrieved by the casual use of "icon." My friend tries to avoid this usage himself, he mentions in an e-mail, but he confesses, "I'm afraid I myself have fallen into the trap on a number of occasions, being a regular computer user (what else is one supposed to call those little images on one's desktop?)."

What, indeed? The cute little pictures of the trash can and the file folder and the rest, first developed by Doug Englebart for the XeroxPARC Alto in the late 1970s, and then popularized by Apple Computer, were essential to making computers accessible to the wider public. Without exactly revering these icons, one can nonetheless appreciate that they are very, very useful.

Time was when pictures were used for signage because people couldn't read. They identified the barber by his pole and the fishmonger by the picture of the fish (and perhaps by the smell); they would meet for dinner at the White Swan or the Golden Hind. Nowadays most people can read, but our circuits are so overloaded that we rely on icons and logos – another Greek-derived term, this one referring to that which isn't quite word but isn't quite picture either – to guide us.

Crashing through the airport, hurtling from Concourse A to Concourse D with only half an hour between flights, we spot a familiar logo across the food court and voilà! Suddenly a chance to fill that nagging emptiness in our billfold becomes an option. Or in an unfamiliar environment, a well-known logo can signal that we aren't that far from home after all.

A few years ago I visited Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria, a sort of walled city as theme park. The tradition of signage with pictures rather than words was maintained. As I walked down the street one morning, I noticed an elegant gold-toned shop sign caught in the sun – could it have been gold leaf? Something about it was familiar. I looked again and realized I'd recognized, almost subliminally, the well-known double-arched "M."

I'd found the McDonald's in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

We've been exuberating lately here in New England over the victory of the Patriots at the Super Bowl.("Go, Pats!") The word is that the team is now "officially" a "dynasty."

Well, why not? Isn't a team entitled to such a claim when it's won three out of the past four Super Bowls? And why stop there? The Pats have won 60 percent of all the Super Bowls played in the Third Millennium. (Note to self: Remember to sign up for that course in statistics.)

The Pats are the new Cowboys, apparently.

Not to be a fussbudget, but why "dynasty"? However common this usage, equivalent roughly to "perennial champions," is in sports lingo, I haven't found it in any of the several dictionaries I've just checked. Most give two main definitions, as does, for instance, the Compact Oxford: "1. a line of hereditary rulers; 2 a succession of powerful or prominent people from the same family."

Key elements here are notions of inheritability and of durability over generations, whether we're talking about the Ming Dynasty or the Kennedys or the Rockefellers. Patriots coach Bill Belichick may be establishing certain standard practices and traditions, but DNA is not being passed from one player to another.

On the other hand, a generation isn't what it used to be. In the case of professional football, analysts more knowledgeable than I argue that the salary cap and free agency for players make it much harder to hold a team together at a consistently high level of play. A "generation" may be five years.

And maybe the Patriots are now a dynasty – "officially" so in the sense that an excitable child may tell you his father "literally" blew his top last night.

Among all the language and grammar issues that prompt readers to write or call into a newspaper, questions of word meanings like this loom surprisingly large. Should we save certain words for certain meanings – like Mom with her sewing scissors and her paper scissors, and woe betide the child who uses one where the other was called for? How do we feel about stretching the meaning of a word to cover, in this case, not only the guys in silk robes but the guys in helmets and body padding too?

Another D-word that's been getting knocked around lately is "decimate," widely used in a sentence like this: "The village was decimated by the tsunami; of its 500 inhabitants, only 73 are known to have survived."

"Decimate" originally meant to kill by lot every tenth man, as of mutineers in the Roman army. Merriam-Webster Online gives another meaning: "to exact a tax of 10 percent from," and cites an example from John Dryden ("poor as a decimated Cavalier"). The Roman Empire has fallen, however, and "decimate" has been widely but not universally extended to mean "to kill large numbers of people."

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language identifies this extension as a "usage problem" – i.e., notes that not everyone is happy with it. A 66 percent majority of the dictionary's Usage Panel approved the extension, as long as it referred to killing and not to other large-scale destruction, e.g., "The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl," a usage that only 26 percent of the panel accepted.

One of my counterparts at another newspaper has a rule about American Heritage's "usage problems." It is simply: "Don't go there." Any usage the dictionary identifies as a "problem," he avoids – never mind what the panel says.

In the case of "decimate," the tenthness, the fractionality of it all, is plain to see: We know the "dec" root from "decimal" and "decade." If we save the word for imperial Roman mutinies, we'll never get to use it, but in the case of the village hit by the tsunami, we're better off using the word "devastated" instead.

How does the broad vs. narrow argument play out for "dynasty" in the sports sense? The word comes from Greek (the "y" in the first syllable is a tipoff) and is connected to concepts of "lordship." Dictionaries give its root as "dunasthai," a word meaning "be able." The Patriots have shown they are "able." We may be just fine with "dynasty."

"If you want to leave your footprints on the sands of time be sure you're wearing work shoes."

This little bit of folk wisdom has been stuck in my consciousness like a bit of lint for a few decades now. The Web page I found to confirm my memory of the proverb described it as "anonymous Italian." Other sources had variations ascribed to "anonymous American" or "anonymous African" sources.

All these are allusions to a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which includes the lines,

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time

Footprints have been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, ever since a colleague posed the question, How do you express the idea of having less of a footprint? "Footprint" had been used metaphorically in a story we were working on; the reference was to aid organizations providing relief from the Asian tsunami. They were seeking a lower profile, trying to ensure that their presence did not skew the local economy, as for instance by driving prices up. They were thinking about their "footprint," to use a term often used among environmentalists, in the local community. They wanted to have less of one.

So is that a smaller footprint? A dissolving one? A diminishing one?

If you're talking about actual human footprints on the beach, for instance, they can be said to disappear or dissolve with each crash of the incoming surf. Similarly, footprints on a dusty hiking trail are subject to wind and rain. But neither kind exactly gets "smaller."

What's happened here is that what I think of as the "literal" meaning of "footprint" is becoming the quaint, old-fashioned meaning. The computer world's use of "footprint" ("this computer has a footprint of 10 by 16 inches"), and the telecommunications world's usage (the area a satellite covers is its "footprint") are becoming concrete, primary meanings of the word – which then opens up further as a source of metaphor.

When Longfellow (to say nothing of the anonymous American, African, and Italian) used "footprints" as a way to talk about leaving one's mark, making a difference in the world, making a contribution in the world, the idea was, the more the better.

And in satellite land, coverage is good, so a wider footprint is better. In computerland, a wider footprint means more of your (literal) desktop taken up with computer hardware. Not good.

"Footprint" is used by environmentalists attempting to measure the demand human beings put on their environment. An outfit called the Global Footprint Network has developed what it calls the Ecological Footprint tool as a means to this end. From their perspective, narrower is better.

The aid organizations in Asia are taking this specialized usage and adapting it to a local economy which is, after all a sort of ecosystem, one which they want not to damager further but to support with their presence.

As our story noted,

"Afghanistan was the first major international operation designed on the principle of the small footprint," says Douglas Keh, spokesman for UN Development Program (UNDP) in Banda Aceh. "Since then, we have sought to minimize our presence."

They have sought, in other words, to leave a minimal footprint.

Footprints have come a long way since Longfellow.