Writers who write in English are blessed with riches beyond the dreams of avarice. We are gold miners working from a lode approaching 800,000 words. We paint from a palette of almost infinite tints and shades. Our special vocabularies number in the hundreds.

Consider the language of painting. Strictly speaking, a TINT is light, a SHADE is dark. By definition, a tint is “a color produced by adding white to it.” A shade is “a color produced by a mixture having some black in it.” Thus, pink is not a shade of red. Pink is a tint of red. And cobalt is not a tint of blue. It’s a shade of blue. The distinction is of no particular consequence unless you’re painting one house or 10 fingernails, but we ought to keep these things straight.

In the field of interior decoration, some terminology overlaps. A CURTAIN is a hanging screen that can be drawn back or up. A DRAPE is a window treatment with textiles lighter than a DRAPERY. (A drape is also something an attorney general hangs over a painting of a nekkid woman.)

Janet Mason of Durham, N.C., asks about “continuous” and “continual.” A mnemonic device may help us remember the difference. The “ous” suffix is the key. The Mississippi and the Amazon run continuously; they flow in One Uninterrupted Stream. By contrast, the dog in the next apartment barks continually. There are intervals in which the exhausted mutt goes to sleep.

(Afterthought: I couldn’t remember how to spell “mnemonic,” so I looked it up. The adjective owes its curious orthography to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, daughter of Uranus and Gaea and the mother by Zeus of the Muses. There is no extra charge for this foray into genealogy.)

Question: When we’re hunting for a lost ball on the sixth hole, do we look farther or further? The general rule is that “farther” is literal, “further” is figurative. The rule founders as soon as we put any weight upon it. In theory we are supposed to ask, “How much farther is it to Tucson?” (We’re talking kilometers or miles.) It’s always farther than we think. Of course, if one is in Phoenix it’s not such a fur piece to Tucson. If we are calculating the distance from Tallahassee, Tucson is raht fahr away. I digress.

The problem with farther/further is that the distinction fades in the bleach of metaphor. Can scholars go any further (farther) in digging into “Hamlet”? Does a biographer travel further or farther into the realms of his subject’s adulteries? The venerable Henry W. Fowler predicted in 1926 that “further” eventually would become the preferred adverb in almost all situations. Fowler’s successor, R.W. Burchfield, devotes four heavy columns to the issue in “The New Fowler’s” and concludes finally that the usage “rests on shifting sands.” Readers will have to find their own way out of this one.

A note arrived in March from Dale W. Saville of Charlotte, N.C. He asks about “flounder” and “founder.” If there is a device for remembering the difference, I haven’t found it, but there must be one somewhere.

The verb “to flounder” conveys an image close to desperation. It is to struggle for footing, to thrash about wildly. Toward the end of March, the Bush administration was floundering with decisions in Iraq. Writers flounder in search of a simile. The verb is distantly related to the North Atlantic fish of the same name, Platichthys flesus, a tasteless entree not greatly improved even by ketchup.

Its cousin, the verb “to founder,” dates from the 14th century in the sense of sink, submerge, fall to the bottom. It is said of a lame horse that it has foundered. If a corporation fails utterly, it founders. If it takes Chapter 11, it merely flounders. A “founder” is either a sick cow or a rich alumnus. They should never be confused.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.