A WORD, PLEASE — dictator

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a job in ancient Rome that came with an alarm clock.

the verdict: Every house has one person who guards the thermostat, and sooner or later somebody shivers and grumbles, "Fine, you little dictator."

a word, please: Dictator. A word, please.

the crack: Come back with me two and a half thousand years, to the young Roman Republic, around five hundred and one B C. Rome had a clever plan for emergencies: when the city was in mortal danger, it could hand one person supreme power. They called that person the dictator, from the Latin dicere , "to say," and its busier cousin dictare , "to say it again and again, to give the orders." The dictator was simply the one whose word was the order. But here's the beautiful catch. The job came with a timer: six months, no more, and if you solved the crisis sooner, you handed the power back sooner. As the Romans told it, a farmer named Cincinnatus was called from his plow to save the city. He did it, resigned after just sixteen days, and went back to his plow.

the collision: Even the Romans argued about the word. The old scholar Varro guessed it meant "the one who gets named." It's a charming guess, but the word's shape tells the truer story: a dictator is the one doing the saying. English borrowed the word in the late thirteen hundreds, and for two centuries it meant only that Roman office, a history-book word. Then, around the fifteen nineties, we started pinning it on any ruler who grabbed total power and simply never gave it back. Notice what fell off along the way: the timer. And now it has wandered all the way to whoever controls the thermostat. Rome's most solemn office, defending sixty-eight degrees. Cincinnatus would at least approve of one thing: nobody holds the thermostat forever.

the glimmer: Here's the part worth keeping: Rome's most dangerous job had a timer on it, and the man they remembered as a hero was the one who gave the power back early. The word only went bad when people stopped going home to the plow.

the exit: That's the word. And if you're the thermostat dictator in your house, remember the Roman rule: six months, then hand it over.