Some months ago columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of the secretary of defense:

“Mr. Rumsfeld thought the war could showcase his transformation of the military to be leaner and more agile. Paul Wolfowitz thought the war could showcase his transformation of Iraq into a democracy. Dick Cheney thought the war could showcase the transformation of America into a dominatrix superpower. And Mr. Bush thought the war could showcase his transformation from family black sheep into historic white hat.”

Showcase? The verb was born as a noun around 1835. A showcase was where Granny kept the cut-glass flyswatter. When did the noun emerge from its cocoon and morph into Dowd’s flashy verb?

Almost at once, says Merriam-Webster. By 1845 “to showcase” had come to mean, “to exhibit, esp. in an attractive or favorable aspect.” To exhibit? This one traveled the other way: Born as a verb in the 15th century, it was weaned to noundom about 1626. And where did you find “noundom”? Thanks for asking. I just made it up. Shakespeare made up hundreds of words. Why can’t I make up one or two? Don’t answer. Noundom, for the record, lies east of verbdom and south of adverbia.

Isn’t ours a lovely language? One of its charming aspects is that a routine search for one word leads to other words we’ve never met before. A teacher in San Antonio recently gave me an account of her profitable sashay through the dictionary:

“Yesterday afternoon I was writing my granddaughter, a freshman at U-Tex, Austin. She’s a lively girl. A little grandmotherly advice about boys seemed a good idea. I wanted to tell her not to be too forward – an old-fashioned term, I know – and I wanted to be sure what it meant. I looked it up. It means ‘lacking in modesty or reserve,’ so I used it.

“But you know how it is. For anyone who loves to read, the temptation to browse through a dictionary is irresistible. On the same page with ‘forward’ was ‘fossick.’ It means ‘to search for gold or gemstones by picking over abandoned workings,’ which is what I was doing in Webster’s Collegiate. I was fossicking, and there on the page was a picture of a fossa.

“I had never met a fossa. It is ‘a slender, lithe carnivorous mammal of Madagascar that resembles a cat, esp. in having retractable claws but is usu. considered a viverrid.’

“I had never met a viverrid either. These little furry fellows are related more or less to ferrets and squirrels. They comprise a family that includes ‘the civets, genets, linsangs, and in some classifications the mongoose, and that are rarely larger than a domestic cat and are long, slender, and like a weasel in build with short, more or less retractile claws and rounded feet.’ I was going to look up ‘genet’ and ‘linsang,’ but I had to finish my letter and it was almost drinking time and I gave up.

“P.S. I said the temptation to browse a dictionary is ‘irresistible.’ Did you know you can spell it either way, irresistable or irresistible?”

I did not know that, so I went fossicking. My Texas lady was right-on. You can indeed spell irresistible either way. But I wondered, is there a rule governing the suffixes “-able” and “-ible”? Beats me. My guess is that there are more “-ables” than “-ibles.” A quick sample turns up irrefutable, irreplaceable and irrevocable. Cheek by jowl, to coin a phrase, one finds irrepressible, irresponsible and irreversible; there’s believable, incredible, arguable and inaudible.

English is a very untidy tongue, but it sure is fun.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.