As I wade daily in the verbal streams that flow through Medialand, English seems to be getting more Germanic every day.

Not to say that German is conquering English – not by a Landeskilometer. Overwhelmingly, English vocabulary is crowding into German, as it is into many other languages.

For instance, when I spoke with Tom Bonfiglio of the University of Richmond, in Virginia, he talked of "neue Anglodeutsch," what he calls a "creolized" blend of German and American words that's widely used, especially in northern Germany, especially in the computer and technology fields.

He gave as an example the term hypercard, a kind of software package. He demonstrated its pronunciation, giving it an accent that sounded lost somewhere over the North Atlantic, with the "r's" softened, that was neither American (which would have both "r's" intact and the "y" sounding like a long "I") nor German (where the "y" would be pronounced like the "ü" of "Führer").

(Germans' home-grown computer terminology is not without charm, however. To speak of "storing" a data file, for instance, they use the verb "speichern," originally used for such things as goods in a port. It evokes the Salzspeicher, the picturesque old salt warehouses in Lübeck, dating from the days of the Hanseatic League. The English word "storage," on the other hand, suggests to me concrete floors and cinder-block walls.)

There are a handful of German expressions in vogue in English right now: "Uber," without its umlaut, as in "Ubermom," perhaps a more heroic (more Valkyrie-like?) equivalent of "supermom." Bonfiglio told of a colleague who reported finding a teaching job in the "Uber-suburbs," the spiffy ones.

Then there's Fahrvergnügen, pleasure in driving, which Volkswagen tried and largely failed to graft onto English. "Vergnügen" is the least pleasurable-sounding word I know for "pleasure"; it has a sort of little gulp in the middle, as if one had just made the unpleasant discovery that the balsamic vinaigrette on one's salad was more vinegary and less balsamic than expected.

However limited the influence of contemporary German on modern English, Bonfiglio noted, though, there's plenty of evidence of the "persistence of a Germanic substrate in English." You might say, he suggested, that "English is rediscovering its Germanic roots."

Consider compound adjectives like "cable-ready," "age-appropriate" or "gender-specific." The Romance languages express concepts like this with phrases like "ready for cable" or "appropriate for his age," and some would suggest that English should do the same thing. The example that really got my wheels turning on this is "user-friendly." German has a number of compound adjectives ending in "freundlich," friendly. "Benutzerfreundlich," is such a perfect match with the English "user-friendly," and such a typical German formulation, that if I didn't know better, I'd swear that "user-friendly" was borrowed from, say, Boppard or Bingen.

But the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation of "user friendly" dates from 1977. A citation from two years later refers to the term as a coinage by American computer expert Harlan Crowder.

German is famous for its long words. Of them Mark Twain wrote, in his essay, "The Awful German Language,"

These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page – and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too.

But English does the same thing, just with different punctuation, Bonfiglio pointed out: "The second baseman's baseball mitt," he said, improvising an example, "is basically all one compound term."

Both languages tend to pile up modifiers in front of nouns: What Twain called "the compounding-disease" was something he identified in English-language newspapers as well, as in: "Clerk of the County and District Courts Simmons was in town yesterday."

And for informal speakers of both languages, a preposition is a word it's perfectly all right to end a sentence with.

Temporal nuances are important to both, as well.

"Germans like to be oriented in time," says Klaus Jaeger, professor of German at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. It would seem that modern English speakers have a similar desire. I see a tendency to press temporal adverbs into service to modify nouns: "In 1981, then-President Reagan said such and such," for instance. In an earlier time, we might have assumed that "1981" took care of the "then" part of it.

But German has a nifty set of special adjectives that cover a broad range of time relationships – the verbal equivalent of those deluxe sets of wrenches ("32 pieces!") for sale on eBay.

These adjectives would come in extremely handy if you were, say, the gossip columnist for the East Overshoe Overview and wanting to explain a situation like this: "When she was a student, she went to Europe with her of-that-time boyfriend [damalig, 'her then-boyfriend,' some would say today] boyfriend, and it was very awkward when they ran into her of-former-time [ehemalig, even further back in the past] boyfriend at the Louvre. The relationship was never the same again after that. In fact, at the luggage carousel at the end of the trip back, she made eye contact with somebody new, her after-that-time [nachmalig] husband – who is not to be confused with her now-husband [jetzig], to whom she's been happily married for 10 years now. He's a three-time [dreimalig] mayor of East Overshoe, and he's quite a guy – one of a kind [einmalig, literally 'one-time,' but figuratively 'unique']."

If English were to acquire its own version of this particular toolkit, a 21st-century Mark Twain might someday write an essay called "The Awful English Language."

A report in the Monitor's pages of a young musician who associates musical intervals with specific flavors on her tongue was a fascinating example of what scientists call synesthesia - a response in one sensory mode to a stimulus in another. Associating musical tones with colors is one of the most common types of synesthesia, but the musician my esteemed colleague wrote about identifies a perfect fourth with mown grass, for instance, and a minor sixth with cream.

Hey, whatever it takes to keep you on pitch. (I would have expected cream to be a major sixth myself.)

Synesthesia is perhaps one of the further-out branches of a topic I've been paying some attention to over the past few years: the vocabulary of sensory impression.

A shared experience is a validated experience, whether it's, "Do you see that red-winged blackbird way over there?" or "Did you feel the chill in the room after she made that comment about his ex-wife?"

Hence the value of being able to describe one's experiences as fully as possible. After all, if I can't be sure that my "red" is the same as your "red," what hope do we have that "our democracy," for instance, can possibly be "their democracy"?

I'm not always sure whether it's synesthesia or just confusion that governs some people's description of sensory perception. During last year's presidential campaign I heard a great sound bite from a fortunate resident of one of those "battleground" communities where electoral outcomes are not foregone conclusions, and where office-seekers actually come calling in order to court voters: "We're tactile," a man told a radio reporter. "We like to see our candidates."

What he presumably meant by "see" was "see in person," which gives an opportunity to "press the flesh," as they say on the political hustings, and that, of course, is legitimately described as "tactile." (For extra credit, discuss the relationship between "pressing the flesh" and "putting the squeeze on" someone.)

Speaking of tactility – I'm struck by how often I hear or read of people speaking of something having this or that kind of "feel" where I would expect it to have a "look" (a movie, for instance) or a "sound" instead.

A film reviewer in the Midwest blasts a recent Hollywood release:

The movie has the feel of a mass of indifferent footage that was salvaged by heavy editing and dialogue dubbing.

And The Guardian had this to say about Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally's latest:

Whether intentionally or not, The Tyrant's Novel has the feel of a book written in a hurry.

Hmm. Is "feel" the right sense to invoke to discuss a novel? Perhaps – in that a novelist can create a whole world the reader more or less moves into until the book is finished.

In the world of Harry Potter fandom, meanwhile, there's a bit of buzz about the soundtrack for the next "Harry" film that manages to fuse – or confuse – sound, sight, and touch.

"A number of John Williams' original themes will be in the soundtrack, including Hedwig's Theme with a "darker feel."

The Akron Beacon Journal recently ran a story on the stage set for a dinner-theater production of "Beauty and the Beast." The article described how the musical is meant for adults, and quoted the artistic director as saying, "It's definitely a darker feel than the movie.''

Here we go again, I thought.

But it turns out he really meant it. The show was designed to spill out into the audience. "[Director] Cercone wants the show to be a sensory experience. 'You can touch, you can smell, you can taste if you wanted to.'''

It sounds as if he is in touch with his feelings, after all.

A reader has written in to take issue with the use in the Monitor's columns of that venerable cliché of journalism, "the carrot and the stick."

It's generally taken to mean "rewards and punishments," and is often used to describe the approach (cf. that other venerable cliché, "two-pronged approach") one nation takes to trying to modify the behavior of another. At the moment Iran getting such treatment from the United States and Europe, which are concerned.about Tehran's nuclear ambitions. As they say, one nuclear bomb can spoil your whole day.

Against this background, Gentle Reader writes,

In this metaphor the stick is NEVER intended to be a symbol of castigation. The 'stick' is part of the tool which involves using a stick and a length of string to which a carrot is tied. This whole apparatus is used to hold the carrot just out of reach of a domesticated animal in order to entice it to move forward. Of course, since as the animal steps forward the "prize" moves forward in relation to its movements, the carrot is always just out of reach.

No wonder the Iranians are ticked. Our reader continues,

[Your writer] makes the same mistake that thousands of other people who grew up in the US make. He confuses the "carrot and stick" metaphor with the comment attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

If our reader is right that "carrot and stick" is widely misunderstood, the problem is not confined to the United States. In publications outside the US "carrot and stick" treatment is being applied not only to Iran but in India and the Balkans, as well, to cite but a few examples. TR would seem to cast a very long shadow indeed.

I think that what's happening here is that a familiar expression has completely slipped whatever moorings in reality it ever had and taken on a new life. After all, when was the last time you saw an actual live donkey?

The Word Detective, aka Evan Morris, supports our reader's view of "carrot and stick" working together as one. But curiously, he cites the Oxford English Dictionary, which, it seems to me, fuses the two interpretations of the phrase. He writes,

The Oxford English Dictionary seems to endorse the "reward and threat" interpretation, explaining the phrase as being "with allusion to the proverbial method of tempting a donkey to move by dangling a carrot before it … an enticement, a promised or expected reward; frequently contrasted with ‘stick’ (= punishment) as the alternative." Yet the earliest (1916) citation for the phrase listed by the OED seems to refer to a carrot dangling from a stick attached to and moving forward with the donkey itself."

However charming the idea of the dangling carrot, the "punishment vs. reward" interpretation is the one that seems to be meeting a need in public discourse just now. "Carrot and stick" is in that final phase of cliché-hood, when it still makes some pretense of being a clever expression, before congealing completely into a set phrase or idiom.

And as Miss Manners will tell you, there are reasons for some of the set phrases in our lives. There are times when we don't need to be clever or original, we just need to be present and sincere. Bully.

"What kind of birds are those?" I asked the official of the retirement community in Arizona. I was touring as part of my coverage of business in the Phoenix area a number of years ago.

Details like this are known as "color" in the news business. They help justify a reporter's making an actual trip to the scene, instead of doing all the research by phone. I'd escaped Boston in February for this, and I wanted to bring back the goods. My pen hovered just over my notebook for a millisecond as I awaited an answer.

"They're coots," I was told.

"Coots? As in 'old'?" The words were out of my mouth before my sense of tact kicked in. I wanted to be sure I was hearing right.

"Yes," my guide replied with a tight smile that made me think it wasn't the first time that particular question had come up. But if they didn't want people to make jokes about old coots at the retirement community, they should have had some other kind of bird. So there.

Sometimes the literal and the metaphorical planes of our existence get a little too close for comfort, but there can be something satisfying about seeing them compress into one.

Just the other day, for instance, I was somewhat bent out of shape, metaphorically, because my glasses were, literally. A quick visit to the optometrist for the skillful ministrations of his specialty pliers took care of the problem. And once again, the spectacles sat squarely on my nose.

Here's an example of the two planes merging in the news business: Recently the Monitor had a story about how the controversy over whether illegal immigrants should be able to get driver's licenses was playing out in Los Angeles. The city was "roiled" by controversy, the story said – roiled being a great newspaper verb, short and active, meaning "stirred up," literally or metaphorically. Los Angeles is a classic "melting pot," in the sense of being a city of immigrants from all over the world. So it was just perfect to be able to say the "melting pot" was "roiled."

Another example from real life: As the baseball season was reaching its glorious climax last fall, I went to dinner with a friend in one of her favorite neighborhood restaurants not far from Fenway Park. It looked as though the Red Sox could beat the Yankees, and this part of town, at least, was abuzz over preparations being made for security and crowd control around the park. My friend had the inside skinny on what had happened at an important meeting at the mayor's office that morning. But before she told me, she looked carefully all around her to make sure the source of her information, a neighbor of hers, was not there to overhear her passing it along. "You're being quite circumspect," I commended her. After all, "circumspect" derives from Latin words meaning "looking around."

Another example from newspaperland: A Monitor story from Rome on Pope John Paul II's reservations about "godless" secular democracy referred to a particular Jesuit publication as having the "imprimatur" of the Vatican: Anything it printed could be assumed to be speaking for the church. Getting to use "imprimatur" (Latin for "let it be printed") was like having an occasion to use a special punch bowl at the holidays. Rome, with its tradition of censoring some publications and banning others, is the hometown of "imprimatur."

Copy editors are never really off duty. Even over omelets and home fries at the local diner, questions like, "Whatever happened to 'thee' and 'thou'?" are likely to come up.

English is unusual among European languages in that it makes no distinction between the second-person singular and second-person plural pronouns: In proper modern English everyone we talk to is "you," whether it's our significant other, our pet gerbil, the kids' carpool ("Will you please pipe down back there!?") or the homeowners' association.

Many other languages have a "familiar" second-person singular and a second-person plural form for groups, naturally, and also for people one doesn't know too well. For instance, in French, the significant other and the gerbil are clearly "tu"; the carpool and the homeowners both "vous." But many relationships are less clear-cut, and it takes a certain mental energy to keep the "tu" friends and the "vous" acquaintances straight, especially, say, at a dinner party with both around the same table.

English speakers are spared all this – and have been for centuries. The second-person singular "thou" has long since been overtaken by the all-purpose "you." A linguist at the University of Cincinnati reported in 1998 on his study of some family correspondence in Norfolk, England, dating from ca. 1425 to 1480, finding not a single "thou" or "thee" or "thy."

Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible may be the main points of contact for speakers of modern English with the inflected language of "thou" and "thee." Shakespeare could be inconsistent in his use of such forms, and the inflections of the KJV were already becoming archaic even when it was hot off the press in 1611.

But what happened to "thee"? Why did it fall into disuse?

Our friends at Wiktionary, in a passing note on a grammar table, say of the second-personal singular, "It disappeared as English society became mercantilist, leaving many feudal ties behind."

That may be a rather sweeping statement, especially unelaborated, but linguists do link the disappearance of "thee" to a growing egalitarianism in England, and to the expansion of a rather fluid middle class, especially in contrast with the more rigid and conservative societies on the Continent. Linguist musings over the electronic grapevine suggest that at a time of social structures in transition, it was safer to call everyone "you" rather than risk offending one of one's social superiors by addressing him as "thou."

"Thou" seems to have been used as a putdown by the 17th century. A discussant from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee notes, "In the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, the prosecutor sought to insult Raleigh with, 'I thou thee thou traitor!'"

Now we may wonder whether we've thrown the baby out with the bath water. Having jettisoned "thou" and reassigned its functions to the multipurpose "you," in the interest of flattening the social hierarchy and/or lowering the barriers to intimacy, we still seem to feel a need occasionally for a pronoun that unambiguously signifies a group.

American English offers several possibilities here, none of which is quite a national standard. Southerners have "y'all"; in the Northeast, there's "youse" and its variations, more familiar from the movies than real life, but still to be heard occasionally. There's also "you people," which has sometimes gotten some other people into trouble. And then there’s the ever popular "you guys."

It is a phrase that's been part of my personal lexicon since I was a little girl in southern California, where I heard it in sentences such as, "Hey, d'you guys wanna play hide-and-go-seek until we hafta to go in?"

In an age so fastidious about gender-exclusive language that many people would be reluctant to call the female head of a congressional committee a "chairman," the curiously unisex "you guys" lives on.

The "sudden emergence" of this locution in New York, if that's what it was, prompted a Daily News writer to opine in 1980, "This most remarkable development, which happened without anyone's noticing, is the biggest thing to hit the English language since the time of Shakespeare." This writer clearly saw "you guys" as compensating in the plural for something that was missing in the singular.

"Where art thou now that we need thee?" he asked.