THE French novelist Gustave Flaubert believed that only one word could give justice to a particular thing — 'le mot juste' — and he obsessively searched for it before committing himself on paper. He may well have been right. After all, short of deliberately destroying the thing itself, there really isn't much we can do to change its fundamental nature. Thus, in the English language, an 'apple' will remain an 'apple' till it's eaten and digested, and 'Eve' will remain 'Eve' even after she has eaten that apple and is cast away from Paradise. Fortunately for us, however, there's really no semantic law forbidding us to call an 'apple' or 'Eve' by some other word the next time it figures in our thoughts or on our tongues.

How dreary language, communication, and literature would be, in fact, if Flaubert's prescription for words — like what is generally believed as the preferred French prescription for kissing — were to be followed to the letter! Then we would have to contend every time with the tedium of going through passages like this: