What do you call an ad hominem attack when it's made against a woman?

That’s the question that popped into my mind the other day when I read a reader comment e-mail taking issue with a story by one of the women on our staff.

The message didn't discuss ideas or facts. Its tone was acid and the criticisms intensely personal, and directed to my colleague specifically as a woman.

Almost all reader comment can be useful to a news organization, and most of us learn more from our critics than our flatterers. But in this case I responded, "This message is beyond the pale of civil discourse and is being deleted."

What's happening to the national conversation in America? Why are so many people screaming?

Do people say things on a recorded message or an e-mail form that they wouldn't say face to face with another live human being? Similarly, do political actors say things of their opponents that they wouldn't otherwise, because their real audience is the 24/7 news cycle?

This is a time of national soul-searching; we are caught in a war in Iraq, and it's not clear how we will get out. Many people are frightened, angry, or dismayed – perhaps because they see an administration in Washington that has lost its compass, or because they feel those pesky liberal media just won't give the president credit for any of the good that is going on.

We've seen Rep. Jack Murtha (D) of Pennsylvania break down in tears as he called for withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date."

We've heard Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) of Ohio booed off the House floor for insinuating that Mr. Murtha was a coward who would "cut and run," and now we read that she's apologized.

We've seen much of the president's trip to Asia last week consumed with damage control, and then damage control for the damage control. The White House staff at some point realized that comparing Murtha, a decorated former marine and staunch advocate of the military, to "ultraliberal" filmmaker Michael Moore was too risible to be an effective response to Murtha's call for an exit strategy.

As of Monday morning, both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney are back on the high road of commending Murtha's character, even as they dispute him on policy. Whew.

Reality check: Washington hasn't yet fallen back to the low point it reached on May 22, 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the chamber of the just-adjourned US Senate and beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a passionate voice against slavery, into unconsciousness. The Senate website provides an interesting detail:

If [Brooks] had believed Sumner to be a gentleman, he might have challenged him to a duel. Instead, he chose a light cane of the type used to discipline unruly dogs.

Sumner himself seems to have been not exactly a model of parliamentary decorum. Brooks's physical attack was evidently a response to Sumner's rhetorical attack on his uncle, Sen. Andrew Butler, also of South Carolina, and Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, two Democrats whom Sumner identified as chief culprits in the efforts to bring Kansas into the union as a slave state.

According to the Senate website, Sumner "characterized Douglas to his face as a 'noise-some, squat, and nameless animal … not a proper model for an American senator.'"

It would take a while after the Civil War for public discourse to get back to the level Abraham Lincoln suggested in his Second Inaugural: "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Here in the 21st century, I've taken comfort by a commentary by James Carroll in The Boston Globe, on yet another aspect of our public conversation – the revelations of Bob Woodward's connection to the Valerie Plame identity leak scandal. Carroll reminded me why journalism, and the public conversation for which it provides the vehicle, matter so much:

The free press is an absolute value not only because the unfettered flow of information is essential to the republican system, nor only because the fourth estate serves as a check on the power of the other three, but because public expression is necessary for the communal self-awareness that keeps the body politic alive.

And meanwhile – how do you say "ad hominem" (literally, "to the man") when you are referring to a woman? Some experts stoutly maintain that the neologism is unnecessary, because the "man" in this sense is generic; that is, better translated for moderns as "person." Others say there's a need for a specific feminine form, and the locution that seems to be catching on is ad feminam. And that would have been the way to characterize the blast from our uncivil reader.

I keep hoping that Ahmed Chalabi might surrender his political aspirations and find his way onto some other stage – as a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, or maybe a new show by Andrew Lloyd Webber, in extended tryouts out of town somewhere.

But no. The Iraqi deputy premier is still in a feature role, albeit not one of top billing, in the latest chapter of the long-running reality show called World History as It Happens.

A possible contender to be his country’s prime minister after next month's elections, he has been appearing at places like the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in recent days to protest that he did not help mislead the United States into war in Iraq and is not a spy for Iran.

I'm struck by the phrase he seems to keep using to dismiss these allegations: "urban myth." Not "outrageous lie" or "utter nonsense," not some barnyard epithet, but "urban myth." It's sort of hip, but not really slang, not some nonce word catchphrase that a century hence will have scholars scratching their heads and asking, "What did he mean?"

It's an interesting word choice for someone trying to signal, "Hey, I'm OK, I speak your language."

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "urban myth" as "orig. US" and referring to "a sensational but apocryphal story which through repetition in varying versions has acquired the status of folklore, esp. one lent plausibility by its contemporary setting, or by the purported involvement of someone known to the teller. "

Oxford's first citation goes back to 1960, referring to urban myths of east Africa. "Urban legend," with examples going back to 1968, is a variant.

When I made a check of some online dictionaries, I turned up similar information, including one citation accompanied by a pop-up ad for psychics ("One free question. Get accurate, immediate answers") which tells you something about the neighborhood where "urban myths" hang out.

For a classic example of an urban legend, you might want to take a moment to Google the phrase "vanishing hitchhiker," to see how that folkloric phenomenon has crossed oceans and adapted to new modes of transportation over the centuries. (In earlier versions the hitchhikers were on horseback.)

I'm struck by how "urban," which after all means "of or pertaining to a town or city" seems to be pressed into service to mean "contemporary," as in the contemporary settings that seem to give such folktales credibility as they have. Why not "surburban legends" then, or "legends of the gated community"?

Our feelings about cities, and living in them, are mixed, and our language reflects this, from "Ford to City: Drop Dead" to "I (heart) Boise." A webzine on word origins, called "Take Our Word for It," offered a special feature on urban vocabulary a few years back.  The skyline of the big city looms over all sorts of words – "urbane," obviously, but "civil" and even "polite" (which some trace to "polis," the the Greek word for city) as well, to say nothing of "cosmopolitan." It has remained, even though "cosmopolis" ("universal city") has never quite caught on.

In other contexts, "urban" has come to be a sort of code language to mean African-American, as in the demographic slice-and-dice game of commercial radio. "Inner city" is another phrase pressed into service as code. People are supposed to understand that it doesn't mean Wall Street or Fifth Avenue.

Metropolis, as readers of classic comic books know, is where Superman lives. Etymologically, it means "mother city," home base, the capital of a region. "Metropolis"  is also the name of a 1927 movie by Fritz Lang. Gotham City is Batman's hometown. Both are (wink, wink, nudge) understood to be New York.

But what about "Gotham," anyway? It's too ubiquitous in New York to have been borrowed from the comic books, surely?

It's traced to Washington Irving, who used "Gotham" in his "Salmagundi Papers" (1807 – definitely pre-Batman). And it refers, to the "Wise Men of Gotham," which is a village in Nottinghamshire, England. One website I poked around in describes their story as among the first "urban legends."

The story is that King John intended to live in the neighborhood, but that the villagers, foreseeing ruin as the cost of supporting the court, feigned imbecility when the royal messengers arrived. Wherever the latter went they saw the rustics engaged in some absurd task. John, on this report, determined to have his hunting lodge elsewhere, and the wise men boasted, we ween [imagine] there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.

In contemporary terms, we'd say the Gothamites were worried about gentrification.

A very useful-sounding term just popped up on my screen the other day, and now I find myself wondering how I can possibly have been in journalism for all these years without having known it.

The word is "dietrologia," an Italian word meaning the "science," loosely speaking – very loosely speaking indeed – of scoping out ulterior motives (actual or imputed), of finding the story behind the story of public events.

It's an informal coinage, from "dietro" (behind) and "logia," the Italian equivalent of the "logy" element of English words, meaning "study," as in "psychology" (study of the mind).

The term appeared in a column on the Monitor's website, on the question of Italian connections to the dubious "intelligence" the Blair government in Britain and the Bush administration in Washington relied on to bolster the now-discredited claim that Saddam Hussein's agents sought to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

Our column included a link to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle citing Henry Farrell, a professor of international studies at George Washington University. He  described reports about the Italian intelligence community's involvement in the Niger uranium affair, as "examples of what Italians call 'dietrologia - a word that loosely translates as the widespread belief that political, security and criminal forces are constantly engaged in secret plots and maneuvers.'" The article went on to quote Mr. Farrell:

There is a pervasive [public] belief of dietrologia carried out behind the scenes by powerful, shadowy figures, all more or less incomprehensible except to a few insiders in Rome.

As a term, "dietrologia" seems to go back a few decades, to a period when Italian politics seemed to have more than its share of mysterious political murders – remember the Red Brigades, the murder of Aldo Moro, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi.

The term has been back in the news just in the past few days, though, as Italians marked 30 years since the death of communist writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Even now, Agence France-Presse reported, Italians speculate whether he was murdered in a political assassination engineered by the conservative government of the day, or by fascists.

"In Italy, there are two great defects. Dietrologia and the love of a mystery,” said Carlo Lucarelli, writer of police novels and host of a television show which unravels Italy’s real-life mysteries. “But dietrologia is positive when there are clear holes in the investigation and when the people ask themselves if the event didn’t happen differently."

We might say that "dietrologia," as an assumption that there must be more (much more!) than meets the eye, is the counterweight to Occam's Razor, the principle that if two otherwise equally valid explanations for something are offered, the one that should be accepted is the simpler.

Some may quibble that "dietrologia" is of interest to cynics, and it probably is, but that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't be paying attention, too. This D-word seems to strike close observers as a very Italian pattern of thought, but I don't think they have a corner on the market. At roughly the same time the Italians were practicing their dietrological skills on their politicians, Americans were working through the "long national nightmare" of the Watergate affair – the "third-rate burglary" that ultimately brought down a presidency. Talk about more than meets the eye.

There are any number of situations in Washington today that appear to provide opportunity for practicing dietrological skills. One can't help noticing how many media reports claim to offer not "the real story" per se, but "the story behind the story" – whatever that means.

And when I noticed the "Behind the News" feature in the Week in Review section of the Sunday New York Times, I thought, this is it. "Dietrologia" has arrived in the English-speaking world.

Politicians' desire to make war often exceeds citizens' desire to be sent to war.

Such are the challenges of foreign policy in a free market with an all-volunteer military. What do you call the people who fill the gaps arising when politicians insist on going to war anyway?

There are 20,000 "private security contractors" in Iraq: This is the number –and name – widely used to describe the legions outside the armed forces of the US and its allies, but doing work remarkably like the work military people do. This figure has popped up in such places as a much-linked-to article in The Washington Post and a documentary from the PBS program "Frontline."

But "20,000 mercenaries" is another phrase that pops up as well. Are these two different names for the same army?

"Mercenary" derives from Latin – note the "merc" root, meaning "market," which it shares with "commerce" and "merchandise" and other such words. It's been in the English language since the late 14th century, and originally referred to one who did any kind of work for pay, although, as distinct from being an unpaid volunteer.

But early on, the word seems to have picked up a whiff of filthy lucre. The Oxford English Dictionary cites as a usage example from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (1386) a line wherein the Parson is described as "a shepherde and noght a Mercenarie." With a little bracketed note ("Cf. John x:12") Oxford refers us to the New Testament's Gospel of John, which contrasts the "good shepherd," who "giveth his life for the sheep," with the hireling, "whose own the sheep are not" and who abandons them when the wolf cometh.

Whatever the conditions of their employment, let's note that the soldiers of this army of 20,000 have in fact been paying the ultimate price in numbers roughly comparable to those of regular armed forces. The admittedly incomplete information on the Iraq Coalition Casualties website indicates 278 contractor fatalities to date.

But the usage history of "mercenary" illustrates what we might call Gresham's Law of language: the narrower, "bad" meaning of a word tends to drive the more neutral, nonjudgmental ones out, as the word begins to take on more of an emotional load. Just a few lines south of the Chaucer quotation, the OED notes sternly that "mercenary" now refers "exclusively" to "a professional soldier serving a foreign power."

Some of us remember learning in school that the British hired Hessian "mercenaries" to help them put down the rebellious colonials during the Revolutionary War. It was seen as a sign of the righteousness of the American cause that it could be defended by a ragtag band of farmers and fishermen, whereas the mighty British Empire had to hire on extras in an attempt – unsuccessful in the end – to hold up its side.

The "foreign power" aspect of the definition has many people bristling against the use of "mercenaries."

Over the past summer, the BBC solicited on its website comments on contractors in Iraq, and experiences from those working for private security firms in Iraq.

One discussant cast the phenomenon as just another example of corporate outsourcing.

"Ahmed" in Edinburgh, Scotland, however, had this to say:

When foreigners not part of an army get caught in Afghanistan they're "illegal combatants", however when they serve the mighty USA they're honourable "contractors". America needs to cut down on this sort of hypocrisy if it wishes to be a responsible superpower.

The BBC also quoted "Ian" in Baghdad, working for a British security firm, which he defended as providing "a professional, low profile service attuned to the operating environment." He further notes,

While private security contractors are a concern, they are not - at least not typically - used in an offensive role thus the term mercenary is not correct.

It may not be as simple as that, however. Security analyst John Robb has coined the term "global guerrillas." He uses it specifically to refer to Latin Americans who were trained by the United States to prosecute drug wars in the jungles and who now find themselves with time on their hands, ready and willing to work in Iraq for much less money than veterans of the US military typically get from private security firms. Even high-end skilled labor is subject to price competition, it seems.

To whom do these people answer? Where do they fit in the rules of war? Those are questions for lawyers and lawmakers. But the wordsmiths should help think them through.