Q: A reader wrote that the Decem-ber “Language Tips,” discussing milk and bilk, stir and spur reminded him of Mark Twain's comment: “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” He added that another writer's description of a longtime journalist as “an inveterate Supreme Court correspondent” was not accurate, because as a Supreme Court employee, the person described as “inveterate” could not have quit at any time, so she could not be called “inveterate.”

A: The Supreme Court correspondent employee-status is irrelevant to her description as “an inveterate reporter.”

The adjective inveterate comes from the Latin verb inveterare, “to make old.” Its first meaning, when it came into 15^th century Middle English, was “obstinate, antagonistic, or –more kindly– “long-established.” Webster's Third (1993 edition) lists as archaic the meaning “obstinately prejudiced or antagonistic.” The 1985 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary lists inveterate as, “Firmly established by long standing; deep-rooted,” or “persisting in an ingrained habit; habitual.”

Those meanings are still current. Both dictionaries also imply that the adjective inveterate applies to inanimate objects rather than to people. The New York Times has been called, “the inveterate New York Times, and Justice Benjamin Cardozo once described a precedent as “so inveterate that the chance of abandonment is small.” Synonyms listed for inveterate are “chronic, confirmed, deep-seated,” hardly what the author meant as a description of the Supreme Court correspondent.

But in any living language, words change in meaning through time, often either improving or worsening, a process that linguists call “amelioration” or “pejoration.” And dictionaries are slow to record the changes. The process of amelioration has affected inveterate. It is now applied to persons as a compliment, so that the description of the Supreme Court correspondent can be considered complimentary.

Q Have you seen the new meaning of the phrase beg the question?

A:Yes, but that meaning is not new. It was listed in dictionaries as early as 1983. The phrase beg the question was originally used, mostly by linguists, to describe a rhetorical device, in which the speaker includes in a question the conclusion the speaker desires, the classic illustration being, “When did you stop beating your wife?” But almost as soon as beg the question came to be widely used, a new meaning was added: “ignore or dodge the question.”

That meaning has now virtually driven out the original meaning. Perhaps the change occurred because the word beg has, for many persons, the sense it contains in “begging for alms,” and also because beg is used in the verb phrase to beg off with the sense of avoiding something.

A similar change has occurred in the meaning of the word problematic, whose original meaning was “questionable,” but, in the usage of those who decide what language means (the general public), it soon came to mean “a problem,” and is now almost exclusively used with that meaning.

Q:Chicago attorney Jeffrey Blum-enthal sent an interesting question, which reveals his interest in language. He asked about the correctness of the words neither/nor, either/or and or/nor in a pleading he was drafting:

A: There is no problem with the grammar of that statement, but the style could have been slightly improved by the following changes, for parallelism:

Q: How does one refer to the plural of mouse when talking about the instrument we use with our computers? I have overheard lawyers refer to them as mouses, but that sounds wrong.

A: It sounded wrong to me too and my dictionaries ignore the question. But Google lists the plural for the gadget as identical to the plural for the animal: mice.

My misquote reminded me of a similar error (which editorial editor Jack Rosenthal noted in The New York Times”). Yogi Berra famously said of a New York Mets pennant race, “It ain't over till it's over.” When Robert Maxwell (the British press lord) repeated the comment, trying to show his familiarity with American slang, he remarked, “As Yogi Bear once said, a thing is not done until it is done.”