Since few of us know the special speech modes, the recurring nametags can sound cliché, even silly. But for audiences who grew up with the stories in a living tradition, the metonymic tags were passwords to the world of their gods.

Foley realized not only that the nametags are metonymic but also that they are key to the great efficiency of oral communication. Many other scholars have benefited from Foley's insight, says Harris. "It's just so right that it's now passing into standard usage," he says.

Most of us picture classics scholars spending their days poring over ancient volumes in dusty libraries.Foley has done his share of that, but what truly set him along the path to prominence was his decision to add field study and computer analysis methodologies to the classicists' tool kit.

This technical bent was no accident. As an undergraduate at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., Foley triple-majored in physics, math and chemistry -- the result of family pressure that he work in the sciences. He describes his parents as first generation Italian- and Irish-Americans who had latched on to the American Dream in a big way. By the time Foley finished the second grade his parents made their ambitions for him clear: He would become a neurosurgeon.

At roughly the same age, however, Foley began lessons in French and quickly became enthralled with the power and mystery of the new tongue. His parents' wishes notwithstanding, Foley knew he wanted to spend his life working with languages.

Later, in college at Colgate, the dutiful son bowed somewhat to family pressure and embarked on the science-heavy curriculum mentioned above. But a funny thing happened on the way to medical school: The Francophile fell in love with the clunky, card-fed computers that, for the particularly prescient, heralded the beginning of today's digital revolution.

After graduation Foley broke once and for all with parental expectations. With the blessing of his rogue aunt, a French teacher who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, Foley enrolled in the graduate English program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

There he enrolled in a Beowulf class taught by Robert Creed, a top scholar of medieval oral tradition. The professor recited part of the poem from memory each day in class.

"He claimed to be doing it to illustrate the meter, but in the meantime he hooked us on the idea of it as an oral poem," Foley says. "That gave me the perception of this as an experienced reality rather than as an object, a subdued text you could hold in your hand and analyze. That really got me to thinking about what to do and how to understand it and study it after that."