What a difference a year makes. One way to get a bead on what we were thinking and talking about throughout 2005 is to look at the new words that came into our lives, or came back into them.

A number of different dictionary publishers, wordsmiths, and other language observers have helpfully offered up, in recent weeks, their takes on "word of the year."

New words for new things are a particular kind of candidate for this distinction. The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen "podcast," which it defines thus:

"[A] digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

Although Podcastingnews.com sniffs that this definition "would be considered incorrect by many podcasters," it concedes that it "reflects common usage without being overly technical," and goes on to note:

Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, said: "Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story."

Words of the year are not all new words, of course. Some of us remember "tsunami" from earth science class in school. But "tsunami," as the one-word summary of the Southeast Asian tragedy, one of the year's major events, surely deserves a place on the list of Words of 2005.

"Refugee" is another word of the year (WOTY) because it was a WITN (word in the news) after the displacement of hundreds of thousands after hurricane Katrina. The Oxford English Dictionary says of "refugee" that it was first used to describe those who fled to England from France after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had protected Protestants' freedom of religion.

When "refugee" was applied to those evacuated to safety from Katrina and the subsequent floods, however, some saw an attempt to deny those in the shelters their full status as citizens.

I'd have to call "integrity" the sleeper hit of the wordsmithing year. Not hip or flashy, it was nonetheless the No. 1 most often looked-up word in Merriam Webster's online dictionary. It's a quality being sought, and alas, not always found, in corporate financial statements, in research data, in the statements of political figures under indictment. No wonder it's being sought in an online dictionary, too.

"Out of the mainstream," a designation commonly used in what passes for public discourse to put down political opponents, was named "phrase of the year" by Paul J.J. Payack, head of the nonprofit Global Language Monitor.

The editors of the Webster's New World College Dictionary (the Monitor's preferred dictionary) chose "infosnacking" as word of the year. It refers to time people spend at work doing things not related to their job, e.g., checking movie listings or their home e-mail account. It's a word of our time, because in an age when everybody seems to do everything in front of a computer screen, "work" and "play" look very much alike. You can even flirt with that new hottie in the accounting department over the same instant messaging program the boss thinks you're using to get real-time data from the shop floor.

But some word-watchers speculate that "infosnacking" may be just a flame-out, a word that doesn't get a real foothold in the language. And so it may not make it into your dictionary in 2006. As an article in the Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) reported,

When the editors spotted the word ''infosnacking'' late last year in an Associated Press story, they thought the term for acquiring discrete bits of information on various Web sites during office hours, might stick. It didn't. ''We have no explanation for this,'' [Webster's editor in chief Mike] Agnes says.

''[Infosnacking] was trendy. It was interesting and amusing, and it made us think. Those are the criteria for word of the year. It had an interesting history, and it points up what can happen with the various coinages. As dictionary publishers, we really don't try to predict the future. We report the news after the fact,'' he said.

Radio "shock jock" Howard Stern has found a higher calling. His paycheck, at least, will be higher. At the end of the year, he is moving to Sirius Satellite Radio, which will pay him half a billion bucks (yes, that's billion with a "b") over five years to do what his corporate masters hitherto, Infinity Broadcasting, no longer seem enthusiastic about having him do over the public airwaves – especially not when they have to pay fines to the Federal Communications Commission.

A group of pundits were all cranked up about this on one of the Sunday morning talk shows last weekend.

Whether Howard Stern represents the cutting edge of public discourse in the United States, or a clear sign that the End of Civilization is near, I will leave to others for the moment. What particularly caught my ear was the phrase for the medium in which Mr. Stern has hitherto worked: "terrestrial radio." Maybe it was particularly striking because one expects the counterpart of "terrestrial" to be "celestial," as in "celestial navigation," for instance.

But Howard Stern – celestial? Nah.

"Terrestrial radio" is an example of a retronym - "a word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development," as the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language puts it.

It's a somewhat awkward definition, but I can't easily do much better.

"Terrestrial radio": That's what your dad had, and probably your grandfather too. It was a piece of furniture, and it sat in the parlor. Out on the lonesome prairie, that old cowboy used to strum his "acoustic guitar." Teenagers used to tie up "the land line" at the house in the evening – no, they didn't call it that, it was just "the phone," the quaintly singular phone.

Similarly, we have print newspapers, broadcast television, onshore oil rigs, and postal addresses (or snail-mail addresses, with their endearingly apt rhyme). We have analog watches, too. Actually "watch" has been through a couple of retronymic revolutions. In the beginning, a "watch" was a pocket watch. Then the wristwatch appeared on the scene, and the retronym "pocket watch" came in to use. As wristwatches became the norm, they lost their modifier. Then the whole cycle started again with "digital watch."

Another kind of backward-looking language is "backformation," which Merriam-Webster Online defines as "a word formed by subtraction of a real or supposed affix from an already existing longer word." Once again, the definition is easier to understand if you already know what the word means.

Here's an example to the rescue: "to burgle." Although "burglar" sounds like one of the legions of "doer" words in English, meaning, we might suppose, "one who burgles," its "ar" ending should tip us off otherwise. "Burglar," literally one who breaks open a fortress, came first; it seems to be rooted etymologically in a sad metaphor of a household servant gone wrong. "Burglarize" is the more standard verb for what a burglar does; "burgle" is what the Etymological Dictionary Online calls "a hideous back-formation."

But hey, what's a growing language to do? We have new concepts and need new words for them, which we often adapt from words already in use. And that's how we end up with pairs like terrestrial and satellite radio. And as for Howard Stern: Contrary to what some of the talking heads were saying over the weekend, he isn't really going "off the air." He's going "into space."

I surmise that I'm not the only one hoping for some clarity on United States policies regarding detainees in Iraq or the war on terror.

When I punched in the phrase "bright line" along with the word "torture," into Google, I got 46,100 hits. For a very rough gauge of public interest in a given subject, one can do worse than that.

"Bright lines," as in "bright-line rule," meaning a clear, unambiguous standard, are in demand in other contexts as well. The phrase came up in the matter of Kelo vs. the City of New London, Conn. That's the case wherein the US Supreme Court ruled that local government may use the right of eminent domain to take private property, including family homes, for local economic development, as distinct from specific needs like roads or schools.

In his opinion in the case, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote,

Petitioners' proposal that the Court adopt a new bright-line rule that economic development does not qualify as a public use is supported by neither precedent nor logic.

"Bright line" seems to have a background as a legal colloquialism. In an entry in the blog Language Log, Mark Liberman traces the term  back to an earlier Supreme Court opinion, one written by Felix Frankfurter in 1949, and speculates that the locution goes back even earlier.

But didn't the "bright line" use to be a solid black line – as contrasted with the "thin gray line" of subtlety, nuance, and – let's be candid – creatively exploited ambiguity?

Back to the torture issue: Philip Carter, a former Army officer who writes on legal and military affairs from Los Angeles, wrote in Slate,

Before the events of 9/11 and America's global war on terrorism, soldiers and spooks had at least a few bright-line rules: Never target civilians; never beat prisoners; never violate the Geneva Conventions….

Not so fast, counters Lisa Hajjar of the University of California at Santa Barbara. She argues, "there is no bright line empirically distinguishing torture from 'everything else.' Rather, torture is like a core within layers of violence."

Nathan Newman, a lawyer and activist, has another perspective: Torture is one of the issues where liberals tend to wimp out:

This focus on "bright line" issues like torture and the death penalty by liberals seems to reflect a lack of comfort in liberal moral argumentation that involves "grey" zones.

Thus, he suggests, some liberals rail against the death penalty, imposed on relatively few, instead of taking on the more complex question of why so many Americans are incarcerated; or they get exercised about the treatment of detainees as a stand-in for a discussion on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq in the first place.

Speaking of "grey," or "gray," as Monitor style rules require me to write when I'm not quoting a published source: Thin gray lines are still being drawn – and smudged. And crossed.

The online magazine Digital Web published an article on plagiarism in the age of the Internet:

A thin gray line is drawn on the battlefield of inspiration versus theft – a line which is crossed every day, on and off the net.

Similarly, the world of computer hackers – black hats and white hats – seems also to include a population of "gray hats," cowboys of cyberspace who ride along what CNET News has called a "thin gray line." On one side are security experts in the service of corporate or government employers; on the other are those who would bring those employers' systems down. In the middle are those who like to poke around in other people's systems just to see what they can find.

The CNET News report suggests that there are more gray hats than you might think, but they've been forced to one side or another as a result of more stringent copyright law and greater litigiousness on the part of companies.

The "gray hat cowboys" are being fenced in, in other words – in an example of what I think of as conceptual geography – we use metaphors of physical space to organize our understanding of ideologies or schools of thought. It's something we do so readily that we scarcely realize it: "His politics are way off to the left" or "She has taken the opposite side of that issue." We draw lines on this imaginary landscape. Sometimes we seek to discourage someone from even traveling in a given direction, as in the phrase, "Don't go there," often used to shut down a certain line of discussion, as author Leslie Savan argues in her new book, "Slam-Dunks and No-Brainers."

I'm still wondering, why "bright" lines. The adjective suggests those fluorescent highlighters that leave a line not only bright – yellow or chartreuse or whatever – but broad.

I'm pretty sure those weren't around in Justice Frankfurter's day. Butwe live in a more colorful world now. To go back to the cartographic conventions of solid black lines and dotted gray ones would be just too, well, black and white.

A search in the newsroom the other day for a shorter synonym for "accountability," for the sake of a better-fitting headline, reminded me what a rich vocabulary we have for accounting, tallying, keeping score.

We count our blessings at Thanksgiving, and recount our adventures of the year in our annual holiday letters, or at year-end family and professional gatherings. And as the bills for all our indulgences come due in the new year, we may struggle to settle our accounts – or at least pay up the minimum due.

It's also striking how "account" in the sense of telling a story coexists with the word's financial or quasi-financial meaning. "He couldn't account for the money he was advanced." "She was called to account for her actions." "His account of the evening's events didn't square with theirs."

This coexistence is found on the Latin side of the English language – "account" in all its meanings is traced back to the Latin "computare." (Ancient Romans made their computers out of marble). It's also found on "the other side of the family" – the Anglo-Saxon side of English, where words like "tell" and "tale" have roots in concepts of both reckoning and narrating.

Scholars tell us that the first writing was probably by the Sumerians, and probably consisted of agricultural accounts. In the beginning were the numbers. Words and story lines came later.

Bank tellers count out coin, and a storyteller's currency is words, but both activities share a root. Banks have tellers and counters, and the words should mean the same thing. But the language has evolved so that the former are people, and the latter are pieces of furniture.

Counters are also markers or tokens, as in the original "exchequer" in England. As the website of the Her Majesty's Treasury explains it,

…the name “exchequer” derives from the chequered table (based on the abacus) which was used from about 1110 for calculating expenditure and receipts.  Exchequers were normally held twice a year when the Chief Justice, the Lord Chancellor, the Treasurer and others sat round the chequerboard, auditing the accounts of each local Sheriff who collected and spent money on behalf of the Crown.

The Exchequer is an oblong board measuring about 10 feet by 5…with a rim around it about four finger breadths in height, to prevent anything set on it from falling off.  Over it is spread a cloth, bought in Easter term, with a special pattern, black, ruled with lines a foot, or a full span, apart.  In the spaces between them are placed the counters, in their ranks.

It all sounds rather more picturesque than the idea of money flitting around electronically, doesn't it? This may be the source of the expression "to square accounts," which goes back to 1260. It any case it's the reason I wince when the grand term "chancellor of the exchequer" gets rendered into a generic "finance minister" in a news story.

Tradition, as that great American folk philosopher, Yogi Berra, might have observed, is not what it used to be.

My "click" moment on this point came last week as I heard some talking head on the radio going on about how the shopping madness of "black Friday" – the day after Thanksgiving – has become an "enshrined tradition."

Whatever happened to saving "tradition" to describe Christmas caroling, or baking gingerbread cookies? And then "enshrined" – in effect, made sacred? What's up with that?

Side note on "enshrined" – in its most literal sense, it means "put in a special box," such as a reliquary. "Shrine" is traced to the same Indo-European root (meaning "to bend or turn") as "shrink," and so the exalted concept of enshrining and the mundane, commercial-sounding concept of shrink-wrapping are arguably related.

But when Tevye sang and danced in celebration of "Tradition," he surely wasn't thinking of a shopping orgy on the day after Thanksgiving.

"Tradition" derives from the Latin tradere, "to deliver." A tradition is that which is delivered – Grandma's recipe for gingerbread, for instance. ("Treason," amateur etymologists will be interested to know, is a black-sheep cousin – the idea behind that word is that one hands over, or delivers, one's compatriots or one's country to the hands of the enemy.)

"Tradition" is at home in the kitchen or the workshop (craftsmen's techniques) as well as in the grander forums of the public square (civil liberties or open debate) or our houses of worship.

But something in me resists applying the term to the encrustations of our commercial culture.

Black Friday – sounds grim, doesn't it? – is said to be so called because it's the date that retail merchants' finances go into the black for the year. The term has been traced back to 1982. The explanation may be folklore; after all, the idea that it is the busiest shopping day of the year has turned out to be folklore, too - one of those oft-repeated-but-no-one-knows-for-sure bits of conventional wisdom.

More recently we have been introduced, by an outfit called Shop.org, to the faux tradition of "Cyber Monday" – the "traditional" opening day of the online shopping season – "the day many employees begin their heavy-duty online shopping from the comfort of high-speed, secure Internet connections at work," as the online publication Network World helpfully explained.

Shop.org itself had this to say in a press release:

While traditional retailers will be monitoring store traffic and sales on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), online retailers have set their sights on something different: Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

But Shop.org is not exactly a disinterested party in all this: It's a trade association of online retailers.

As a bit of entrepreneurial chutzpah, this is along the same lines as the diamond cartel's campaign to convince prospective bridegrooms that it's "traditional" to spend two months' salary on an engagement ring.

"Tradition" seems to have a shorter cycle nowadays. Thus it is possible, for instance, to talk about "smartphones" contrasted with "traditional cellphone," by which is meant, presumably, those that don't take pictures or include a global positioning function.

Harrumph! If you want to talk about "tradition" with regard to the phone, I will talk to you of phones that were solid black, heavy as bricks, and bolted into the wall, quite possibly in some inconvenient place in the house, e.g., the front hallway.

Gimme a break! Or as Scrooge would say, "Bah, humbug!"