Once upon a time, back in the 17th or 18th century, well before I was even in grade school, English grammarians had high hopes for their language. They wanted to polish it like marble and make it follow the rules of Latin grammar. For one thing, they tried to stamp out the practice of ending sentences with prepositions – a fussiness that Winston Churchill famously dismissed (according to legend, anyway) as nonsense up with which he would not put.

And they wanted to mend split infinitives, to banish any interloping modifier intruding upon the sweet unity of a verb with its preceding "to." They would have cringed at one of the most famous split infinitives of contemporary pop culture, the Star Trek motto "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

That "boldly" is misplaced! I can imagine a gaggle of grammarians gasping in horror. "The 'to' and the 'go' should adhere like glue! Away with the 'boldly'! It belongs after 'go'!"

Now just what is an infinitive? You can think of it as a verb form that is keeping its options open. It "expresses existence or action without reference to person, number, or tense and can be used as a noun," as one dictionary puts it. It hasn't been "limited," or made "finite" by being broken out of its shrink wrap and plugged into a sentence as a predicate verb. Compare the airy abstraction, the generic sweep, of "To drive into town during rush hour would be foolish" with the more concrete, "He drove into town at 8:30 this morning."

Most of us get this right most of the time. But controversy over the split infinitive ("to boldly go") lives on. Split infinitives, I've found, really are something that people bring up with copy editors in social situations where a bit of small talk is called for. "Hmm, by the way, how do you feel about split infinitives?"

Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an opinion in here somewhere. In Latin, as in a number of other tongues, infinitives are one word. The basic reason one "shouldn't" split an infinitive in English is that one can't split it in Latin.

That said, the rule, however dubious its logic, was enforced fiercely enough over the years by English teachers and others that many careful writers avoid the split anyway. After all, an infinitive is a unit, even if expressed on the page as two words.

And yet there are times when the split may be the best way to express an idea.

"We decided to always walk to school."

Once upon a time, in the 20th century, when I was discussing my seventh-grade English class with some friends, we came up with the foregoing sentence. It was an example of an infinitive that's better off split, at least if we mean one decision, for "always." The alternative that avoids the split ("always to walk") is ever so slightly ambiguous.

Nowadays, in the 21st century, President Bush wants to partially privatize Social Security. And I think the news media ought to let him – ought to let him split the infinitive in talking about it, that is. Seriously, in that sentence, where are you going to put the adverb? "Wants partially?" Or "Social Security partially"? Or "partially secure, socially?" That way madness lies.

One might argue against including the adverb at all: "The president wants to privatize Social Security." Omit needless words, right? "Privatizing partially" is arguably a subset of "privatizing." Ah, but that would be misleading, conscientious headline writers cluck. And so defense of nuances trumps fastidiousness about wannabe Latin grammar rules.

What a relief to be able to cross something off my list of worries: I've decided that "gonna," "gotta," and similar colloquial forms, known as "reductions" or "elisions," are not necessarily threats to civilization as we know it.

I've been mellowed out – somewhat – by a new book, "Unfolding of Language," by linguist Guy Deutscher. He describes the processes by which old forms of language wear down, and new forms are built up. He makes it all sound a little like geology. Seen over the very long term, such processes are as inevitable as the tides.

The specific insight from the book that made me relax a bit was that "going to," used in reference to a specific physical/geographic destination, never elides into "gonna," not even in casual conversation. Compare: "I'm going to the gym tonight. I'm gonna work out."

In other words, the temporal "gonna" is not just sloppy diction and muddled thinking. It's different from the more carefully enunciated spatial "going to." No one would say, "I'm gonna the gym tonight." In a century or two, who knows? This construction may be standard written English. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, as my mom used to say.

And in the meantime, let's think about "let's."

Like many idioms, "let's" phrases are put together from spare parts: an imperative verb with an implicit subject, plus the "us," which serves as the subject (doer) of whatever infinitive verb then gets tacked on. "Let's cross that bridge"= "[you] let us [to] cross that bridge."

The "let us" version of this idiom does show up occasionally in very formal contexts. But in the main, the difference between "let's" and "let us" is that the former includes the one or ones being addressed in the activity, and the latter doesn't. Compare, "Hey, Mom, let's go to the movies tonight," and "Hey, Mom, let us go to the movies tonight." In the first example, Mom is likely to go along; in the second, she'll stay home and wait up for the kids.

Each of these constructions has evolved to meet specific needs. If you're a native speaker of English, you've probably never given this a thought. If you've had to learn English later on in life, you've had to struggle with the nuances, and perhaps have been grateful for resources like "four ways to talk about the future" at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Grammarians have a way of talking about this difference between "going to" and "gonna," or "let us" and "let's." They distinguish between "content words" (dog, tree, walk, sing, red) and "form" words, or grammatical words (an, the, must, not). When "go" refers to physical motion, and "let" means "to give permission," they're content words. But in these other usages, they're what grammarians call "form words," separated from their usual literal meaning.

Tthe good old-fashioned verb "get" has gone through levels of meaning, as Deutscher points out, from concrete to ever more abstract meanings, moving from content word to form word. "He got a root beer out of the fridge for her" is the language of concrete action. The next level shows possession: "I've got three kinds of frozen pizza, plus some leftover Chinese. What's your pleasure?"(I once concretely "got" the pizza; that is, physically grabbed it out of the freezer chest at the supermarket; now I "have got" it, as a fact of possession, in my fridge.) Then comes obligation ("Look, you've got to be on time this once; it's your sister's wedding, for heaven's sake.)" Then certainty: "He's gotta be there; he's just not picking up." At this level, the "got" phrase is equivalent to "must," and has morphed from content word to form word.

"Used to" is a backward-looking counterpart of "going to," an idiomatic way of expressing the habitual past. ("We used to [useta? usta?] eat there all the time, but then a new chef took over and the place went downhill.") "Used" in this sense is a "form word." Compare: "Do you know what technique he used to achieve that effect?"

This is how language evolves. It takes materials on hand, which are perhaps already in use, and adapts them to new purposes. I'm glad to see "gonna," "gotta," and their kin in this larger context.

But they won't be appearing as standard English in our pages just yet. Not on my watch, at least.

What's up with "pushback"? When I heard it twice within just a couple of days in completely unrelated conversations with two different women, neither of them particularly "pushy" themselves, I thought, "Hmm – this may be a word of the moment." And then a day or so later I read about "pushback" in two different places on the same front page proof of the Monitor.

What I mean here is pushback in the sense of "resistance." It's not a meaning readily found in dictionaries yet, but it's pretty clear what's meant, and it sounds vivid and punchy.

Who is pushing back nowadays? Well, for instance, local phone and cable companies challenging municipal efforts to provide free broadband service. An article on NewsTarget.com about such an effort in Philadelphia noted,

The idea of municipalities providing broadband service has been catching on nationwide for the last couple of years, despite pushback from local telephone and cable providers who view city-owned broadband networks as a threat to their businesses.

Efforts to improve moral standards at scandal-ridden Tyco International have been getting "pushback," according to new ethics chief Eric Pillmore.

"I can't say the pushback was immediate, but within the past three years, we have had to come to grips with the fact that our employees have grown up in very different cultures that have shaped who they are," says Pillmore. "But," he adds, "the occurrence of pushback speaks to the effectiveness of the training."

"Pushback" was the word of the hour when Charlie Rose interviewed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the other day. She wasn't the one who brought it up, though. As she mentioned US efforts to encourage "civil society" in Latin America, Mr. Rose countered, "There's some pushback there, though."

From here, the State Department transcript shows, she gave as good as she got:

SECRETARY RICE:  Of course there may be pushback.
MR. ROSE:  This is Latin America.
SECRETARY RICE:  We're going to keep pushing.
MR. ROSE:  But there's pushback.
SECRETARY RICE:  Do you really expect that there's not going to be pushback on new ideas?

The appeal of this use of "pushback" for Ms. Rice, or the wireless crusaders or the Tyco ethicist, for that matter, may be that it is a noun, which can be ascribed to nameless opponents, while one claims the active verb for one's own side: "There is pushback, but we are pushing."

Let's push on.

Are you "laptop-enabled"? Having schlepped my computer to the public library the other day, I noticed a little sign saying "Dear Laptop-enabled Patrons..." advising about wireless Internet access. It's interesting how the enable/disable pair has found new life in the digital age, as a hipper alternative to "turn on/turn off." I remember from my days as a cub reporter in South Carolina that the city government couldn't do anything, it seemed, without "enabling legislation" from the state. This seemed to be a legacy from feudalism. More recently, in pop-psychobabble, "enabling" is a bad thing. Mom dropping Junior's lunch off at school when he forgets it is "enabling" Junior's early morning forgetfulness.

But "laptop-enabled," referring either to gizmos or people, goes to some interesting places, such as "laptop-enabled students" taking notes collaboratively in university classrooms.

The other word of the moment on my mind at the moment is the phrase "going forward" and its fraternal twin, "moving forward."

At a White House press briefing the other day, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the situation in Afghanistan, "What's the expectation now, going forward?"

We might say that "going forward" is the new "henceforth." Quite an improvement, no? It's one of those forms that show how ingrained the habit of seeing time as space is: "the road ahead." When Bill Gates chose that as a book title a few years ago, no one thought he was writing a travelogue.

The "going" of going forward makes it sound more active, even though the "going" involved is often just moving through time, as opposed to, say, "going for a hike," which actually involves lacing up the boots and grabbing the walkingstick.

It's always good to look where you're going. It's long struck me that "looking forward" always has a positive connotation; compare that with: "looking ahead to likely layoffs in the fall." That the delight in "looking forward" is implicit, not explicit, helps make the phrase useful. So, one can end a business letter: "I look forward to working with you to resolve the unfortunate matter of your billy goat, Gruff, and my vegetable garden to everyone's satisfaction." It sounds constructive but doesn't really commit the writer to feelings any warmer than are actually felt.

In the movie "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin played a factory worker so used to the repetitive actions demanded of him on the assembly line that even off-duty, he involuntarily went through the motions.

An off-duty copy editor may be Chaplin's Information Age counterpart: I've always got my antennae up for misspelled words and usages that are not quite right.

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a magazine reference to "Holland."

I immediately thought "'Holland' is usually wrong and ought to be replaced with 'the Netherlands,'" and was reaching reflexively for my red pen when I saw it was a reference to Holland, Mich., which, even were I on duty, I wouldn't need to change. (A colleague of mine has a term for people who work on autopilot like this: "search-and-replace editors.")

The Dutch referendum on the European Constitution last week has meant that "Holland" has been much in the news lately. As I pondered the really big questions such as, "Are Europeans turning their back on further continental integration?" I found myself also wondering, "How come so many people who ought to know better are calling it 'Holland' instead of 'the Netherlands'?"

Editing is often the point at which the irresistible push for shorter, simpler ways of saying things meets the immovable object of the need for standards, accuracy, and precision.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to say "Holland"? Lots of people do – but not quite correctly. There is no such place on a contemporary map. Holland was a county in the Holy Roman Empire. Today North Holland and South Holland are two provinces of the constitutional monarchy now properly known as the Netherlands. And we editors can't pretend we don't know this stuff. Darn!

Similarly, I wish we could get more use out of "Ulster." A splendid little six-letter word, it's often used to mean "Northern Ireland" – the six counties of the Emerald Isle that are part of the United Kingdom, rather than the Republic of Ireland. "Ulster" is shorter than "Northern Ireland" and makes for less cumbersome compounds. But it's not politically correct, alas. "Ulster" was one of the traditional provinces of Ireland – back in the day when the whole island was "united" under British rule. Its nine counties include three that are today in the Republic. Thus Ulster does not = Northern Ireland.

"Holland" has been on my mental map since the days of nursery-school tales of yellow-haired children who wore wooden shoes and lived in windmills. But at some point – learning in school about the Pilgrims' stopover in Leiden on their way to the New World, perhaps? - I picked up the message that "the Netherlands" was the better term.

"Nether" turned out to be an ordinary English word meaning "lower" (all those dikes and polders!), but for extra credit, we found out that "the Low Countries" is a little trio consisting of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, who have combined and separated and combined again throughout history like the colored shards in a kaleidoscope. These three are also known by the beneficent and luxurious, if also somewhat soapy-sounding, name of the Benelux countries; as such they were a precursor of today's European Union. (The Gray and Damp Countries are somewhere nearby, perhaps across the Channel; Pastaland is to the south.)

The people of the Netherlands are sometimes called Netherlanders but more usually designated as "Dutch," which literally means "German" (compare "Deutsch"). The Pennsylvania Dutch are in fact of German and Swiss descent, as their visitors generally find out sooner or later. And "Dutchman" turns out to be slang in the Western United States to refer to a man of German ancestry. Go figure. In the building trades, a "dutchman," lowercase, refers to "a piece or wedge inserted to hide the fault in a badly made joint, to stop an opening, etc." Now go figure that one. And it gets worse. Politically correct it's not.

Sometimes political correctness and simplicity of language coincide. The European Community has become the European Union. Reunification has let us exchange East and West Germany for "Germany." The Soviet Union dissolved, and it was once again OK to speak simply of Russia and the Russians. Whew.

And not to minimize the continuing challenges among the developing democracies (or not-so-democratic states) within the former USSR, but it's hard to argue that a swap that lets us unload "the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic" in favor of the simplicity of "Belarus" is a bad deal.

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote. On a family visit to South Carolina last weekend, I was reminded that good porches make good neighbors, too.

On a perfect spring evening, warm and uncharacteristically unsticky, it occurred to us that the perfect place to adjourn to after dinner was not the living room but the front porch of the grandparents' renovated gingerbread Victorian. After all, there are those wonderful wicker rockers out there, and the porch swing. The next time we're all together like this, we thought, the humidity may force us back into the refuge of air conditioning.

And so we went out to sit and rock and swing and chat and keep an eye on the passing scene. It was a connection with the neighborhood we wouldn't have made had we stayed inside or gone out into the backyard.

A porch is an example of what sociologists, artists, and other students of human behavior call a "liminal space" – a transitional space, in this case, between the private space of the home and the public space of the street. A table at a sidewalk café has a similar dual identity. So, on a larger scale, does an airport: Once there, one has left home but not yet really embarked on one's trip.

A porch may conjure up notions of comfortable sociability and relaxation, but the word is cousin to "port" – as in harbor, as in gate; as in door; as in porter, in the sense of gatekeeper. "Portal" is another member of this family, a fancy Latin-derived term that has found new life in the age of the Internet. Not long ago it usually referred to a grand and imposing entrance to a building. Nowadays it's more often a website positioning itself as an entrance to other sites on the Internet. Note how the "gatekeeper" function lives on in cyberspace.

Another relative, in a more distant branch of the family, is "portcullis," the heavy metal (in the original sense of that phrase) grate that can be let down to close off the entrance of a medieval castle. Porches may be about opening up; a portcullis is definitely about closing down.

There are even some nit-pickers who see the "port" in "opportunity" as a "door" and conclude that the phrase "window of opportunity" is therefore redundant. A window in a door? Maybe they're thinking of a half-door. Other sources trace "opportunity" as referring to a good time to sail into harbor, because the wind is blowing that way anyway.

Whatever its lexicographical kin may be, the porch of the old South has a conceptual relative in the big cities of the Northeast: stoop. This is a Dutch-derived term that has worked its way into North American English. Seldom does a stoop have much in the way of seating options, and "kids hanging out on the stoop" may not suggest as positive an experience as "neighbors sitting on the front porch."

But there is a connection between the two, and it has been made by, among others, Frank J. Dmuchowski, a proud son of Brooklyn, in an essay posted online. Describing the role of "the Stoop" in the life of a very small child, he writes:

When you were old enough to go solo from your apartment, the Stoop provided a safe haven from which to venture onto the sidewalk and to the world. You were not able to stray too far from the safety of the Stoop's harbor until you clearly demonstrated mastery of the skills needed to navigate the sidewalk. You were watched and closely supervised, not only by members of your own family, but also by both neighbor adults and older kids on the block.

Hmm. Sounds pretty liminal to me. And obviously neighborly, too. Mr. Dmuchowski has since moved to rural Wisconsin, and he says he feels right at home: He knows all about the small-town front porches because he grew up with a stoop.

Instead of a porch, newer houses are likely to feature a deck, a private space behind a house, so named for its resemblance to the deck of a ship – conceptually the opposite of the harbor-like porch or stoop.

The feature of the postwar suburban subdivision in which I grew up that came closest to Mr. Dmuchowski's stoop was, oddly, the grape-stake fences enclosing our backyards. "Privacy" was an important concept in those days, for the adults, anyway. For us kids, though, growing up with no climbing trees to speak of, the fences provided an outlet for our exploratory urges. The upper horizontal rails – maybe about six feet off the ground, flat, and easily wide enough for our little feet – made for elevated pathways that let us go from one backyard to another. The fences thus made for what homeland security experts call a "porous border." What had been built to close us in ended up connecting us.