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There's one thing it seems everyone can agree on about U.S. policy in Iraq: It should be "multifaceted."

"The solution lies in a multifaceted strategy that brings together all the vested interests and backs them up with credible force," wrote James A. Lyons Jr. in the Washington Times last month.

"Our best strategy for protecting ourselves will always be a nuanced and multifaceted approach," wrote Cynthia Tucker in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A recent report from the National Intelligence Estimate called for "sustained, multifaceted programs targeting the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement."

"Multifaceted," basically meaning "having many parts or functions" or just "versatile," is a multifaceted word. In a Lexis-Nexis search of newspaper articles from last month, "multifaceted" shows up next to words such as "appeal," "backfield," "career," "delights," "India" "law," "presentation," "poem," "store" and even "pencil."

You have to ask -- if a pencil can be called "multifaceted," is there anything that can't? Does the word carry much weight anymore, or is it one of those words that sounds sophisticated but actually has more style than substance?

"Multifaceted has been around since the mid-1800s, and is a perfectly good word," says John Walston, author of "The Buzzword Dictionary" (Marion Street Press, 230 pages, $12.95). "But it also fits my base definition of a buzzword: A usually important-sounding word or phrase used primarily to impress laypersons."

It's a quirk of the English language that "two-faced" (meaning "deceitful") is a bad thing but "multifaceted" -- literally meaning "many-faced" -- is a good thing, especially as the opposite of "simplistic."

"Facet" comes from the French word "facette," meaning "little face." English first used it to describe a jewel, which sparkles when light bounces off its many facets, or surfaces.

Since then, "multifaceted" has more figuratively come to mean "complex." The Oxford English Dictionary's first example of this is an 1892 reference to "the multi-faceted mind of the German Aristophanes." It then quotes a 1965 book on business: "The nature of decisions is multifaceted and continually variable."

(The OED even found a few examples of the cumbersome noun "multifacetedness," the earliest coming in a 1979 article that talked about "the intensity and multi-facetedness of human relationships.")

The literal use of "multifaceted" as "many-sided" clung to life throughout the 20th Century -- the OED lists a 1965 article describing a disco balls and later ones on artistic sculptures, for example.

But today, unless you are talking about jewelry or geometry, the "having many faces or surfaces" meaning of "multifaceted" seems to have given way to "versatile, having different parts."

Now it's hard to tell if the original meaning is ever intended, even when it works.

For example, author Caroline Weber wrote this in the New York Times last month about Marie Antoinette: "With her glittering rise and shattering fall, her ambiguous political allegiances and unmistakable personal style, the queen has proven multifaceted enough to accommodate most any interpretation, any ideology, any cultural bias."

Here, the sense of the queen having different faces, one for each different interpretation of her, would make sense. But this meaning was either lost on many readers, or it isn’t what Weber meant.

Noor Quek of the Singapore Breast Cancer Foundation told the Singapore Straits Times last month, “I love a multi-faceted life—being a mother, wife, daughter, friend, helping with charitable causes, a career woman and being plain old me.”

Again, the idea of having different faces or roles combined in one person fits the original meaning of “multifaceted.” But “having different parts” is probably what Quek was saying.

“Probably for most people the metaphor is now dead,” says Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University. “The shift is a natural one … and provides a very useful word.”

Endings: "`Treason' has been much in the news of late," wrote Dave Wilton in his "A Way With Words" newsletter (www.wordorigins.org). Last month the United States brought treason charges against an American citizen for allegedly working in al-Qaeda training camps. In September, Iva Toguri, also known as "Tokyo Rose," died in Chicago; she was convicted of treason in 1949 but pardoned in 1977. "The early sense of `treason' means simply betrayal and does not have the specific meaning of betrayal of the state," Wilton wrote.

Medieval law divided treason into "high treason" -- crime against the state -- and "petty treason," -- crime against a citizen -- Wilton explained. Only "high treason" lasted, and became associated with the basic word "treason." ...

Daylight Saving Time ended late last month. That's right, "saving." "It is Daylight Saving (singular) Time, NOT Daylight SavingS Time," admonished the California Energy Commission on its Web site. "We are saving daylight, so it is singular and not plural."

"The issue, I think, is that the word `saving,' like other `-ing' participles, is not commonly used as a noun, but the word `savings' is [as in "life savings"]," wrote linguist Eric Bakovic at Language Log (www.languagelog.com).

"This is especially true in the context of money, and there's a well-known metaphorical link between money and time. So for those who say the "S," the most accessible relevant noun is savings, not saving."

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Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com.

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