Q. Can you explain "unitary executive" as used during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Hearings on the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court?

A. Sure. The meaning makes sense when you look at one of the senses of unitary in our unabridged dictionary. That definition is as follows: "of, relating to, or constituting a system of government in which power is held by a central authority and may be delegated to but is not derived from constituent subdivisions—distinguished from federal."

Hence, "unitary executive" designates an executive branch vested with supreme authority. This might not square all that well with separation of powers among executive, judicial, and legislative branches. And it is definitely contrary to the doctrine of "judicial supremacy" laid out by Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, 1803. The "unitary executive" argument is also the foundation for the "signing statement" attached by the chief executive when signing legislation. (It was not invented by President Bush, but he issued several hundred in his first term alone.) Such statements claim to reserve to the executive branch the power to decide when the actual legislation being signed can be dispensed with as a legal force; the premise is also that the courts should attend to such signing statements when sorting out the intention of a particular piece of legislation at issue. The signing statement receiving a lot of attention lately was presented by the president when signing the McCain-led anti-torture legislation:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

The point is clear: Judicial power is limited, and the executive branch will have the final say on when the law applies or can be ignored, and hence the powers of the branches of government are not co-equal.

Q. I am curious as to why the principle "Occam's Razor" includes the word razor.

A. It is a figurative use, stemming from the metaphorical way in which the principle "slices" away extraneous assumptions. Interestingly enough, this phrase was not promoted by William of Occam (who lived in roughly 1300 AD and was a theologian of great renown); it seems to have been first used five centuries later.

Occam's Razor names the scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. It is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex, or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.

Q. I have noticed you list the origin of banana as Spanish or Portuguese, whereas, to my knowledge, it derives from the Arabic word bana:n ("thumb") which is still in use today.

A. The Arabic word bana:n means "finger tips" not "thumb"; the first evidence of the word banana, however, is from Portuguese observers in West Africa. Its source is presumably any of a number of words in Niger-Congo languages phonetically similar to banana.

There is no reason to think the Arabic bana:n (which is not recorded with the meaning "banana") has any role in the matter, however striking the resemblance.