When the Chinese government announced its decision to revalue its currency last week, the headline on the story on the New York Times website the next day was "China Adopts Opaque Currency Policy."

As the story explained:

China has abandoned one of the world's clearest currency policies, a tightly managed peg of the yuan to the dollar that had endured since 1997. China has chosen instead to adopt one of the world's most opaque currency policies, with a secret mechanism to reset the yuan's value each night."

"Opacity" in this sense has nothing to do with watercolor or other pigments; rather, it's being used to contrast with its good twin, "transparency."

An African newspaper recently warned of opaque government developing in Uganda, for instance.

"Transparency" – both the word itself and the concept it represents – is an important new offering in the global marketplace of policy ideas. As your broker might tell you, it's a "buy and hold."

The literal meaning has to do with ability to let light pass through. In the newer meaning, the word is used to refer to that which is open to scrutiny of the public, including the international public; that which is not corrupt. Some observers point to transparency in this sense as the next big thing in human rights: Transparent political systems and corporate governance are important in helping struggling peoples work their way out of poverty and oppression.

Transparency International, based in Berlin, is major player in this movement. The folks there know a thing or two about "opacity," too, even "sudden opacity," as when Nigeria repealed its anticorruption law a couple of years ago.

Among some recent "transparencies":

Germany's constitutional court has just ordered the country's life insurance companies to make their system for calculating policy payouts more "transparent," for instance.

The People's Daily, China's official newspaper, reported that their country's military has just received a "transparent" shopping list" – as part of an effort to make military procurement more open to "outsiders."

The headline of a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial on mad-cow disease called for "transparent cows," which I should think would be hard to round up for milking.

One commonly hears that elections should be "transparent." In Azerbaijan not long ago, the ballot boxes themselves were transparent, as a BBC photo shows.

Our language is full of words whose original concrete meaning is extended or even overtaken by a metaphorical one. Part of what's interesting about "transparent" is that it's come full circle. Its metaphorical meaning has been made concrete again - literally, that is, rendered in concrete and glass as architects have designed public buildings for institutions wanting to communicate their openness to the public. Such buildings are in effect elaborate visual puns.

A particularly well-known example of this phenomenon is the Lloyds Building in London, home of the famous insurance exchange, designed by Sir Richard Rogers. Another is the Reichstag dome in Berlin, whose glass cupola, designed by his friend, Sir Norman Foster, is similarly intended to let the sunshine into the German legislative process – never mind Bismarck's famous comment about sausagemaking.

Not so long ago, being "transparent," was not necessarily anything to be proud of. "In a transparent attempt to divert attention from the unfolding scandal, the administration announced an urgent humanitarian intervention in Outer Bazookistan. The ruse was effective until several of the White House press corps, trying frantically to locate the helpless country with the GPS function of their cellphones, realized there was no such place."

Sometimes there can be too much transparency. The official Watchdog for Privacy in Rome has just determined that the Eternal City's requirements for transparent trash bags – to ensure trash is being properly sorted for recycling, apparently – pose a threat to personal privacy. Identity thieves and other sidewalk snoops could scope out bank statements, medical records, and the like before the big city garbage truck rumbles up to the curb, it's thought. Sometimes a little opacity is not a bad thing.

It is literally the first rule in the book, if the book you mean is Strunk and White's "Elements of Style": Form the possessive of singular nouns by adding an apostrophe plus "s."

What could be simpler? "The girl's dress is red." "My dog's bark is worse than his bite." "The editor's dictionary is dog-eared."

Oh, but it gets complicated. And very quickly.

The actual example of a noun forming its possessive given by Strunk and White (no, not exactly a standup comedy duo, though their usage guide has stood up well over time) involves somebody named "Charles."

They were trying to be provocative, I suspect – trying to put a marker down. "The girl's dress" would have been just too easy.

According to Strunk and White, Charles has a friend – who needs to be referred to, they insist, as "Charles's friend.""

By choosing "Charles" as their example, Strunk and White signaled that they were parting company with another school of thought, which calls for simply "Charles' friend." With its "buzzed" "s" at the end (what a phonetician would call a "voiced sibilant"), "Charles" all by itself sounds vaguely plural, and for some people, evidently, the extra "s" is just too much.

To complicate things further, consider Dashiell Hammett's detectives, Nick and Nora Charles, – the Charlesles.

All these examples: Charles, Charles's friend (or Charles' friend), the Charleses, the Charleses' house – the basic noun, the possessive, the plural, and the possessive plural – are pronounced the same, "Charl-zez."

But what's really struck me lately is the way that some writers seem to follow the "Charles rule" out the window; they seem not to know when enough is enough. They refer to the house that Jim and Sally Smith live is referred to as "the Smiths's house." Or the possessive of "the United States" is construed as "the United States's." Argh! "States" is already the plural of "state" (as "Charles" is not the plural of "Charle"), and plurals form their possessive with the simple addition of an apostrophe. No additional "s" is needed. Similarly, it seems, one should be able to speak or write of "Universal Studios' latest project" or "Lehman Brothers' annual report."

And what do we do in the case of a reporter for a newspaper called "The Times"? It's a phrase that often shows up in newspaper names. It seems to suggest "the times in which we live" – our era, so to speak, or, as another newspaper name has it, "The Age." ("D'you know The Age of Melbourne?" "Oh, about 170, I'd guess; remember they had the Olympics there in 1956.") "Times" in this sense is a plural noun that doesn't have a singular any more than "scissors" do – or does.

But when a paper is called "the Times," does the "Lehman Brothers" rule apply? Not quite. At some point there were, presumably, actual brothers named "Lehman" who can be construed as the original possessors of the firm that bears their name. But the "times" of London or New York or Los Angeles do not "possess" newspaper reporters, not even in the sense that the dog possesses its bark or its bite (see above). It's better to go with an adjectival form: "The Times reporter."

I know, by the way, I'm not making a very strong case for this other rule, but I do want to note that there is more than one way of looking at some of these issues, and that people who write "Charles' friend" do not necessarily have horns. Such people are, however, subject to revision at many publications, including this one.

In an interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition " last week, singer-songwriter Carole King, promoting her "Living Room" concert tour, described how she was born in Manhattan, then spent some time in Queens, but really "grew up" in Brooklyn. "And I've lived in Idaho for 28 years now, which I think almost makes me a native," she concluded.

Hmm. Almost, but not quite. Being a native of a given place – Idaho, in this instance – isn't an attribute you develop over time. It's something that you either are or are not, and if you aren't , that's it. You can settle in a place, make it your adopted home, and sense your attachment growing deeper with each passing year – but you can't become a "native" later in life.

Am I being too doctrinaire? The language of nativity in the United States is rather complex.

The country consists largely of the descendants of immigrants, and we historically have not been the sort of people who stayed put in whatever port of entry we entered. As a result, many of us are "natives" of one place, which may be different from our "hometown," which may be different in turn from the place where we actually live now.

Yet in this land of perpetual motion and second chances and fresh starts, nativity counts for much. Those born on US soil have US citizenship automatically, even if Mom swam across the Rio Grande this morning, or her plane was diverted from Vancouver to Seattle because of mechanical trouble.

And in Britain, people have been shocked at reports that suspects in the London bombings were native sons. Tellingly, they have been described, in media reports at least, as "natives," as "British," despite their being nonwhite and from immigrant families.

"Native" also comes into play when we refer to the indigenous inhabitants of North America as "native Americans," or "Native Americans." (The capital "n" helps differentiate indigenous people from those born here of immigrants or their descendants, but not all publications follow that practice.)

"Natives" has sometimes had a pejorative connotation, especially with reference to people outside the US: "Going native" is not seen as a good thing for a diplomat, for instance, to do. "The natives are restless," a pop-culture catchphrase that seems to suggest racist colonialist attitudes left over from days of the British Empire, seems to have lost its punch, or at least its sting, to the point that a Hawaiian home and garden magazine can use it to headline a piece on native species to plant in one's yard.

At this time of year in New England, farm stands are full of "native" produce – which people elsewhere in the country would describe as simply "local."

Of course, sometimes "native" means simply "someone knowledgeable enough about a place to give directions." I seem to be the sort of person others turn to for directions on the street, even in places where I'm a stranger myself. During the college summer I spent in San Francisco, I got so used to being accosted by lost tourists that I took to carrying a fairly detailed street map with me everywhere. One afternoon, I noticed, not far from the Civic Center, a couple striding purposefully up to me. I mentally braced myself and started reviewing destinations I was likely to be asked about.

But the first question out of the man's mouth was, "Are you a native?"

I could feel myself bristling slightly. "Well, I live here, if that's what you mean."

It was true, for the summer at least. And I was, in consultation with my trusty map, able to direct the pair to their destination.

The following year I was in Bonn, Germany, with another set of streets and transit connections to master. At one point I took the right bus in the wrong direction and ended up unexpectedly in the village of Duisdorf.

I made my way back to where I belonged. And then the next day, as I was passing the bus stop where I'd gone astray, I noticed a car crawling along at a pace that signaled unmistakably "lost driver looking for someone to ask directions of." I immediately ran to hide behind the nearest big tree. But too late! I'd been spotted.

"Hey, you over there, hiding behind the tree!" the driver called out. "I need you to tell me how to get to Duisdorf."

Sheepishly, I emerged from my inadequate hiding place to explain that I was too new to the area to help him.

I considered suggesting he simply park his car and wait for the bus. But I thought better of it.

Was Sandra Day O'Connor the first female justice on the Supreme Court of the United States – or the first woman justice?

A Google News search of "O'Connor 'first woman justice'" brought up 130 hits, including one from this newspaper. But "O'Connor 'first female justice'" brought up 540 hits; "female" beat "woman" better than 4 to 1.

The adjectival use of "woman" in this sense ticks some people off.

These include traditionalists who insist that "woman" is a noun, and "female" the corresponding adjective.

There's another group of conscientious objectors who hear phrases like "woman doctor" or "lady lawyer" and detect a patronizing tone, or a suggestion that a "woman doctor" is somehow "physician lite," less qualified than a regular doctor, who is understood to be male.

I'm not without some sympathy for both, but my own preference for contexts like the O'Connor retirement is to speak of her as a "woman justice."

"Female" in this sense sounds quaint – "female suffrage," and suggests corsets and fainting spells. "Male and female" is biblical, but also biological; it applies to animals, whereas "man" and "woman" refer specifically to humans, actors on the stage of politics, jurisprudence, the business world. "Male" and "female" are the language of the police blotter ("Male, approx 6 foot 2, in black leather jacket, approached decoy…") and the plumbing or auto supply store – or for that matter the computer store, as you may find out unpacking and hooking up a new machine.

Anyone who thinks O'Connor has been "lawyer lite" hasn't been paying attention. She's become known as the justice whose ear a lawyer has to get in order to win a case before the high court. And the fact of her being a woman was part of her story. (Do those black robes even come in misses' sizes? With buttons on the left?)

If we wanted to point to a single accession to high office that would show that the lot of woman in America has truly changed since women were first granted the vote, we could do worse than to cite O'Connor's elevation to the high court. And so it becomes relevant to speak of O'Connor as a "woman justice."

How has the language evolved during the O'Connor era?

Consider what's happened to "chairman." Nowadays, "chair" is widely used, even by many who a generation ago would have snorted at the term as "politically correct." Still, Alan Greenspan is "chairman" of the Federal Reserve. My hunch is that unless women wholeheartedly embrace "chairman" as an equal-opportunity unisex term, we'll end up in the medium term, at least, with "chairman" as the masculine form and "chair" as the feminine/indefinite ("Our committee needs to elect a chair"). We'll have neither the benefits of "one term fits all" (as we do with terms like "judge," "senator" and even "president") nor an explicit acknowledgment of femaleness, as we do with "woman judge."

"Actress" is another interesting case. When I returned to North America in the late 1990s after a few years outside the English-speaking world, I was somewhat jolted to hear a new (female) friend with a background in the theater refer to herself as having been "an actor." Hunh? It's generic "actor," in the broadest sense of "one who acts," as you see a few paragraphs above, even though I introduced metaphorical "stages" into the sentence. But in a theatrical sense, meseems, actor and actress are like bass and soprano, two different instruments, like cello and violin.

We want to see inclusive language that does not go slack-jawed with amazement at the presence of women in public life. ("Oh, look, look! The House majority leader is wearing a skirt!") That speaks for, in the main, parallel usages for men and women. And yet our language also needs to reflect the fact that a woman's experience of life is different from a man's. That's why it's so important that our legislatures and our courts, in particular, not just be open to women, from an equal-opportunity perspective, but include women, for substantive reasons.

A quick dash through the entry "woman" in the Oxford English Dictionary shows that through much of its history, it wasn't a term full of positive connotations. Oxford's first definition of "woman" is straightforward: "adult female human being." But it goes downhill from there. As a noun of address, "woman" is largely "pejorative or jocular," we read. The dictionary also introduces such lovely expressions as "to make a woman of," by which is meant, "to bring into submission."

How far we've come. O'Connor first stepped onto the national stage at the recommendation of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, her Stanford classmate and sometime date. Now she's concluding her public career as Ted Kennedy's new ideal of judicial temperament.

It would seem that "to make a woman of," in its new juridical sense, may be construed to mean, "to turn (someone) into an independent, fair-minded consensus-builder, widely if not unversally admired for an ability to frame the questions that have to be asked, and to interpret the Constitution in ways that make sense to ordinary people living their lives."