It’s spring and I find, much to my surprise, that my thoughts have turned to…propaganda?

It may be because the spring gardening season is here. The word is related to "propagating," which is, of course, a very horticultural kind of activity.

It may be, too, that the background of the new pope, Benedict XVI, as the head of the Vatican organization long known as the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide has brought "propaganda" out into the public square again.

Perhaps the word is on my mind the way one notices a dog that doesn't bark: The concept is out there, but the word isn't used all that often – or often enough, I would suggest. The references to the pope's former post may be the exception that proves the rule.

"Propaganda" first entered English around 300 years ago to refer to the aforementioned Vatican entity, known in English as the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith. The term broadened in meaning to refer to "any association, systematic scheme, or concerted effort," as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, "for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice."

The word was misconstrued by some as the plural of an imagined singular "propagandum," by analogy with memorandum and memoranda. Such a word might have had its uses as a term to mean "a single line of political (or whatever kind of) message: "He did very well at the news conference; he stayed right on his propagandum and didn't answer a single question."

Later on, "propaganda," (the actual word, that is, not its phantom singular) evolved into something closer to its contemporary meaning.

But as the Online Etymology Dictionary notes, in telegraphic, "Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative."

Once this sense was established, however, it evidently was used pretty freely. The OED contains numerous examples of leaflets, posters, and the like, produced by all parties in the World Wars, being referred to frankly as "propaganda." Josef Goebbels, commonly referred to as Hitler's "propaganda chief," was actually "propaganda minister," if you please. No hesitation about using the word there, evidently.

During the cold war, people were warned against "communist propaganda," which in some of the kookier corners of the country was understood to include such phenomena as Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

In theory, whether "propaganda" is good or bad should depend on whether the information or ideas being promoted are good or bad. But as the term became distinctly pejorative, the persuasion game continued under other names: advertising (a term that, interestingly, early on had to do with "warning") or public relations. In the international sphere, we have public diplomacy, practiced by first lady Laura Bush on her trip to the Middle East this week, and "hearts and minds" campaigns, as efforts to court public opinion in foreign countries are known. John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, and a former State Department official, has been a strong advocate of such efforts.

Less benign is the Washington scandal of "video news releases": Government agencies using taxpayer money to produce ostensibly "informational" videos – the television equivalent of written press releases – that are in many cases simply aired by local stations as if they were journalistically credible news reports.

At a Harvard Forum a few months ago, former New York Timesman Alex Jones, now head of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, lamented the way administration operatives had identified the "weakness, laziness, and vulnerability" on the part of the media, as well as the financial pressure they're under, that would make them receptive to such manipulation. "They saw what was possible."

And just this week, a member of the Federal Communications Commission has called for an investigation into experts touting products on television without revealing that they've been paid to do so. That's payola, Jonathan Adelstein says, and it's illegal.

"Propaganda" can be a useful descriptor for episodes like this. We need to keep it in our vocabulary of public discourse.

Meanwhile, however, I see on a Vatican website that under Pope John Paul II, the original "propaganda" department has changed its name. It's now called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples." It may be that even in Rome, "propaganda" has lost its good name.

Everyone, they say, has a story to tell – only nowadays, have you noticed, the term often used is "narrative." What's sometimes meant by this is not just a good yarn, but a carefully constructed, tightly edited tale, told to some specific purpose: getting someone elected, for instance.

"Narrative" has been on my screen for a while, but it really got my attention when it came up on an article on the socially conscious marketing of casual apparel. An advertising expert was discussing a manufacturer of T-shirts that was attempting to set itself apart from its competitors by creating "a narrative" about its humane labor practices and commitment to manufacturing domestically rather than abroad.

"There is no production-based difference, so the only difference you can create is narrative," he said.

Maybe something like, "Biography of a T-Shirt: From Rags to Riches – a Real Insider's View"?

Every thing, apparently, also has a story to tell.

The political uses of "narrative" in this sense are many. Part of the postmortem analysis of John Kerry's unsuccessful presidential bid last fall was that he lacked a compelling "narrative," as former Clinton adviser Jim Carville put it.

Notice how the Bush administration has managed to use the compelling "personal stories" of appointees like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez to win hearts and minds and Senate confirmation votes. ("Gutierrez's personal story suggests a classic political narrative," Newsday observed after he was nominated.)

Even schoolchildren need to have a "personal narrative" nowadays, at least for the essay portions of the standardized tests that loom so large in American education these days.

But "narrative" is on our minds for reasons beyond mere marketing.

Narrative, story line, is a way of maintaining our bearings; it's our defense against the bits and bytes of information that keep screaming at us continually through every channel, from broadband Internet on our desktops, to the crawl lines across the bottom of our television screens, to the news updates we can get on cellphones programmed to beep at us every time our favorite fanzine has something hot on J. Lo.

Scientists say we human beings are hard-wired to read other human faces. I suspect we may have a similar instinct for human stories, for plot lines.

As anyone who has studied journalism knows, the classic format of an American newspaper story is the inverted pyramid form: The most important thing comes first, then the next most important, and so on to the end of the article, which has the stuff that can be snipped off if necessary. The folklore is that the inverted pyramid style developed during the Civil War, when the telegraph lines were likely to go down during the middle of the transmission of a news dispatch. It became clear that under such circumstances, saving the juiciest bits of information for the last was probably not smart.

But the inverted pyramid, however compelling its logic, left the longing to tell stories, and to hear stories, unsatisfied. One of the significant developments in newspapers and magazines in recent years is the trend toward "narrative journalism," in which stories are told in depth, in chronological order, with "characters," not unlike the characters of a work of fiction. At its best such writing engages the reader with a good story and then subtly, stealthily educates and enlightens as well. It's a technique that's being used for everything from the biography of a T-shirt to the reporting of genocide.

Joseph Stalin has been quoting as saying, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." At a time when so much of "the news" is mass tragedies involving distant millions, narrative journalists bravely set off in search of the one whose story can stand in for the stories of millions. 

"Isms" were not in good odor for much of the last century. American political writers of a centrist-to-conservative cast used to rail against an evil triumvirate of "socialism, communism, and fascism" and contrast them with the only "ism" they liked: "Americanism."

 Goodness, this kind of rhetoric sounds quaint: a relic of the days when journalists were called newsmen, and they clapped their fedoras onto their heads when they bolted out of the office in search of a scoop.

When these worthies said "Americanism," they generally meant the American constitutional system, as it translated into a political culture and a free, open society. In that sense, the term seems harmless.

But see it as American + ism, the ideology of being "American," and it may seem less innocent. Does such a term have counterparts in other countries, and if so, how would we feel about them? How would we feel about "Indonesianism," say, or "Dutchism"? "Japanism"?

I've recently run across another "ism" that might end up making trouble in our own time: Christianism.

Google has rounded up 631 hits for me for "Christianist," along with the query, "Did you mean to search for 'Christiano'?" Hmm, no, thank you. And rats, now I might have to look up ‘Christiano’ later.

 I figure 631 hits for ‘Christianist’ is the Internet equivalent of seeing the first sliver of the sun coming up over the mountain in the morning.

"Christianist" is evidently formed on the analogy of "Islamist." Islamist is in the dictionaries meaning either an Islamic studies specialist or simply an adherent of Islam – a Muslim.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about "Islamism":

Islamism is a political ideology derived from the conservative religious views of Muslim fundamentalism. It holds Islam is not only a religion, but also a political system that governs the legal, economic and social imperatives of the state.

 "Islamist" is a term many Western journalists and scholars came to after deciding that "fundamentalism," which they'd been using, wasn't quite right – in part because it seemed to be an improper borrowing from Christianity.

And so now, after the borrowed "fundamentalist" has been returned, perhaps with polite thanks, to Protestantism, the "ism" of Islamism is being applied to some Christians – the ones seen to be adherents of "Christianism." They're what we might call "political Christianity." Still with me?

Specifically, Christianists are associated with another "ism" – "dominionism" – a political ideology which interprets a passage from the book of Genesis (1:26) as commanding Christians to bring societies under the rule of the Word of God.

It’s not exactly a compliment to be called a "Christianist.” The Portland Indymedia website posted a rant a while back against "Christianist ayatollahs." But the term looks like a useful way to denote the political Christians of the right. And it has a certain symmetry with "Islamist": If Muslims of a political slant are "Islamist," then perhaps it makes sense to call Christians of a certain political slant "Christianists."

Both "Islamists" and "Christianists" have been associated with "hijacking" – the former literally, but both metaphorically. 

 "Hijacking" has been so often used as a metaphor with reference to Islam that even President Bush has gotten into the act, and Pat Robertson has given him grief about it, too.

But now it’s happening to Christianity, too.

"I am dismayed at the way the Christian faith is being more and more hijacked by the right," one author appearing in the blog archive "Things I've Seen" has written.

Onward, Christianist soldiers? Oh, let's not.

Controversy rages in the heartland: Should youth baseball leagues use bats made of aluminum – or of wood? Aluminum has been likened to steroids in its ability to turn a middling player into a power hitter, but some critics charge that all that power can be dangerous, and the risk of accident just isn't worth the risk to the kids.

Controversy raged – briefly – on the copy desk: Are those nonmetallic bats that the critics want youth baseball to return to "wood bats" – or "wooden bats"? Inquiring minds wanted to know, as our story went to press last month.

The dictionary logic of "wooden bats" is unassailable. "Wood" is a noun; "wooden" is the adjective that means "made of wood." In a phrase like "wood nymph," "wood" is what's called an attributive noun, describing where the nymph lives, not what she's made of.

But the baseball guys in the newsroom say the lingo is "wood bats." A quick search at Googlefight.com, which scours Google pages to facilitate comparisons like this, has just brought up 33,100 hits for "wood bats" vs. 25,100 for "wooden bats."

Here's some informed speculation about what's going here:

In the beginning, all bats were made of wood. But the emergence of aluminum bats from about 1970 onward forced the coinage of a retronym, a new term to describe bats that were not aluminum. (Same process for "acoustic guitar" and "analog watch.")

But is that bat wooden – or just wood? That "en" ending, which signals an adjective meaning "made of," is disappearing from the language. "An earthen pitcher," for instance, is one made of "earth," or clay, as we are more likely to say nowadays. Other adjectives with "en" are disappearing, too: I need to polish my oak (not "oaken") bureau, and to pick up some silk (not "silken") thread to sew a button back on my blouse.

Another way of saying this is that we're relying more on attributive nouns nowadays – witness our friend the wood nymph. This is why we see headline constructions such as "Japan, China leaders to meet," as we did last month before the big summit in Indonesia.

Whatever. At this point the bat – whether aluminum or the traditional northern ash, I will leave to your imagination – connects solidly with a long-term trend for a line drive deep into left field: Just as it is becoming necessary to connect the terms "wood" and "bat," that little syllable "en" starts heading for the showers, and the phrase on the lips of the people is "wood bat." Had aluminum bats established themselves earlier – as they might have done, since as a "technology" they go back to the 1920s, "wooden bat" might today be the more popular term.

I find myself reluctant to let go of those adjectival "en" endings altogether.

Why so? They soften the rhythm of a phrase into the natural iambic meter of English (ta-DA, ta-DA): "a golden thread." The "en" lives on in the metaphorical meanings of many words: "a wooden speaker" or "a leaden sky" (vs. "lead paint"). The "en" seems to go into the realm of the poetic, or at least folkloric: "Don't take any wooden nickels" (ca. 1920s).

But replaying in my mind's ear the "en" words I've known, I've remembered one I haven't thought of for years: "olden times." It was a term my playmates and I used as children, still in single digits, before we had had any "history" in school (prehistoric?) to try to sort out the different layers of the past we were being exposed to, through family lore, of course, but also via television, movies, and (this being southern California) theme parks. We might have said "the old days" to refer to "the time before we started kindergarten," but "olden times" covered that period definitely outside personal memory but possibly within living memory of parents and grandparents.

The phrase sounds utterly quaint today, and maybe it did then, too, without my realizing it. The young friend with whom I most associate it had family roots in Tennessee, and I may have unwittingly picked up a regionalism. I'm glad to be reminded of "olden times," before it slips completely back into, well, "olden times."