By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.

The social-media service — where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages — came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

Peter Bianchi, Innovative’s chief executive, says the site’s meltdown was devastating, since a small business rarely receives national TV coverage. But he says the 12-hour site crash didn’t appear to have any lasting damage and online sales of the beverage peaked the following day to their highest level to date.

“Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it just another event,” says Mr. Bianchi. “You can’t do that with a 1-800-number.”

As of Monday, drankbeverage.com had more than 1,000 Twitter followers.

Twitter also helped wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk respond quickly after his company’s Web site, Corkd.com, was hacked so that visitors were greeted with pornography.

While technicians plugged away at the problem, which took about eight hours to resolve, Mr. Vaynerchuk says he shot a video of himself apologizing to customers of the wine-review site. He then posted it on a video-hosting site and linked to the footage from Twitter, where he has nearly 900,000 followers.

Mr. Vaynerchuk, who owns New-York based Cork’d LLC, also tweeted apologies to about 65 people who tweeted about the incident. “Every person that mentioned Cork’d on Twitter got a message from me and a link to the video,” he says.

Mr. Vaynerchuk says his Web site saw no drop in traffic during the days that followed. He also received about 75 emails from customers complimenting him on how he handled the matter.

To be sure, Twitter can also be the root of a problem for entrepreneurs. Virginia Lawrence, a director at Ballantines PR, a boutique agency in Los Angeles, monitors Twitter daily on behalf of several small businesses for tweets that could harm their reputations.

Recently, she says she found several criticizing a client that were from a former employee the firm had fired. The dismissed worker “was saying negative things about how the company was run, as if they were doing illegal things,” she says. Ms. Lawrence notified the client, who then approached the terminated employee about the matter, and soon after the scurrilous tweets stopped.

Twitter can also be an effective way to get a message across to consumers in an emergency. When an ice storm struck the Bartlesville, Okla., area last winter, United Linen & Uniform Services notified customers about the status of their orders through Twitter in addition to its Web site. Scott Townsend, marketing director for the laundry service, says many consumers today will find information about a business on Twitter before anywhere else because it’s where they hang out online. “You fish where the fish are,” he says.

Mr. Townsend adds that while email was also an option, entering customers’ addresses would have been tedious and time-consuming.

Entrepreneurs should bear in mind that Twitter is unlikely to be of help in dealing with a problem if it isn’t used regularly otherwise, says Shel Israel, author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.”

“If you just go to Twitter when you have a crisis, you will have no followers and no credibility,” he says. “The key to using Twitter effectively is to build trust with people who are relevant to your business.”

Steve Fusek, owner of Fusek’s True Value LLC, a hardware store in Indianapolis, now has an employee dedicated to updating the shop’s Twitter profile during business hours. Mr. Fusek says consumers expect to see frequent tweets and swift responses to customer-service inquiries they post.

“You can’t just sign up and leave it. You have to have someone on it,” he says. “If you’re not legitimate, you’ll be found out quickly.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B5

By LEE ROSENBAUM

Salem, Mass.

The paradigm-shifting “Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art,” at the Peabody Essex Museum, begins with a rude surprise: The first wall text that visitors encounter is a parental warning—breaking the mold of customarily child-friendly displays of totem poles and headdresses.

The eye-popping introductory work that “may not be suitable for young children” is Cree artist Kent Monkman’s fiercely satirical, homoerotic “Théâtre de Cristal” (2007), occupying the entire first gallery. It features a 14-foot-high “tipi,” fashioned from delicate strands of crystal beads, accompanied by an artist-written wall text parodying Caucasian ethnographers’ condescending descriptions of “noble savages.” Visitors entering the glitzy enclosure will be confronted by a fleetingly full-frontal silent movie in which the artist’s drag-queen alter ego, “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” (sic), has “her” way with two white men—drunken hunks clothed (and unclothed) in loincloths. This heavy-handed, jejune exercise in score-settling, which resonates with the literal meaning of “shapeshifting” in Indian cultures (the ability to transform into other beings), is a jarring start to a thought-provoking show.

No newcomer to major exhibitions of Indian art, the PEM owns one of the most venerable (since 1799) and largest (15,000 objects) such collections, and is particularly strong in Northwest Coast art. Displaying 73 works from an international group of lenders, “Shapeshifting” drew many of its most important historical pieces from the PEM’s own trove. Two of its great treasures are a boldly patterned, finely woven fringed Chilkat blanket (c. 1832) and a subtly modeled, vibrantly painted Kaigani Haida female wooden mask, c. 1827, which the PEM received that same year from a seafaring captain.

“Shapeshifting” dutifully includes works by the traditional and contemporary artists who are regulars in Indian installations, including the celebrated potters Maria and Julian Martinez, from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, and Hopi artist Nampeyo, as well as the obligatory photo-bedecked Bently Spang contemporary take on the traditional Cheyenne warshirt. But the PEM has also unearthed some rarely displayed pieces, including (from the National Museum of Natural History) a painted hide shield cover from the Upper Missouri River (c. 1820) recording a Plains Indian’s trancelike vision of grizzly bear claws and (possibly) a rain of bullets.

Another seldom-displayed object is a peculiar pine-and-plaster “Sphinx” (c. 1875) by Simeon Stilthda, hauled out of storage at the British Museum for this show. This hybrid has an Egyptian-inspired headdress and forelegs, but a Haida-style face. It exemplifies one of the show’s underemphasized strengths—revealing the effect of cross-cultural influences on American Indian artists.

“Shapeshifting” shakes things up by eschewing the usual organizational principles of Indian displays—region, tribe, chronology, medium. Curator Karen Kramer Russell has instead opted for a thematic approach, mixing up pieces according to amorphous, overlapping rubrics: “Changing” (imaginative innovation); “Knowing” (beliefs and worldview); “Locating” (identity and place); and “Voicing” (self-expression, sometimes politically charged). This casts a new light on objects that have typically been admired more for their beauty, technical accomplishment and function than for the concepts, preoccupations and beliefs that they embody.

For example, one of the smallest but most ravishing works in the show—a Northeastern artist’s rare drawstring deerskin pouch from the late 1600s to mid-1700s—wasn’t merely a repository for tobacco. Its delicate porcupine-quill embroidery invested it with the power to “ensure the survival of [a hunter's] family and community,” as its label explains. The show’s catalog further elucidates the cosmic and spiritual symbolism of the design and decoration of the pouch, which regrettably is displayed so only one side can be savored.

The show’s strong video installations give it a fresh feel, illuminating how some Indians have reconciled their split identity, rooted in tribal traditions and the wider contemporary world.

Dance fans will delight in the ingenuity and artistry of “We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care” (2006) by Tlingit/Aleut artist Nicholas Galanin. He orchestrates the convergence of two cultures, in two consecutive video clips—one showing David Elsewhere, a loose-limbed modern dancer, moving fluidly in his stark studio to a tribal song; the other showing Tlingit dancer Dan Littlefield, in mask and traditional raiment, stepping with rhythmic deliberation to a contemporary electronic score. Mr. Littlefield’s backdrop is a tribal community house’s traditional wooden wall screen, which Mr. Galanin helped to carve more than a decade ago.

Also riveting is Kevin Lee Burton’s “Nikamowin (song)” (2007), a syncopated paean to the beauty of the fading Cree language, accompanied by evocative video images that career through rural and urban landscapes. For me, the most moving work was by Iñupiaq/Athabaskan artist Erica Lord. This two-channel video meditation, “Binary Selves” (2007), ricochets between her alcoholic father’s frozen Alaskan hometown and the world beyond. Ms. Lord finds strength through traditional music, in a virtuosic throat-singing contest with herself.

Pigeonholing such richly nuanced works according to preconceived themes diminishes them. Ms. Russell chose monumental installations that embody all four of her themes to introduce and conclude the show—Mr. Monkman’s “Théâtre de Cristal” and, in the final gallery, Dunne-Za Nation artist Brian Jungen’s endearing yet conceptually complex “Cetology” (2002), a ceiling-suspended, 41-foot whale skeleton, uncannily constructed from plastic pieces of common lawn chairs and intended to evoke not only natural-history displays but also contemporary ecological concerns.

In fact, most of the PEM show’s offerings—not just its high-profile bookends—are open to multiple layers of interpretation. The achievement of “Shapeshifting” is to shift our notions of pots and pouches from alluring and useful objects to conveyors of personal and metaphysical wisdom.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums and blogs as CultureGrrl on ArtsJournal.com.

By RYAN SAGER

What do you call those soft rolls of dust that collect on the floor under your bed? Many people know them as dust bunnies. But in parts of the Northeast, you’d call them dust kitties; in the South, house moss; in Pennsylvania, you might call them woolies.

There are, in fact, at least 174 names by which Americans call these bits of fluff, including bunny tails, frog hair, cussywop, woofinpoofs and—perhaps most evocatively—ghost manure.

That we can identify these words today is largely a testament to the vision of one man: Frederic Cassidy, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English (known as DARE) in a 1962 speech to the American Dialect Society.

Mr. Cassidy died in 2000, at the age of 92, having made it to “O” in his quest to catalog American English in all its rip-staving (that is Ozarkian for rip-roaring) regional diversity. His tombstone bears a simple inscription: “On to Z!”

“That was his rallying cry for about the last decade of his life,” said Joan Houston Hall, 65, who joined DARE in 1975 and took over as its chief editor after Mr. Cassidy’s death. In March, Harvard University Press will publish the Dictionary’s Volume V, finishing off the alphabet with slab through zydeco, nearly half a century after the first fieldworkers fanned out in “Word Wagons” to 1,002 communities across America, administering a 1,600-item questionnaire to sometimes-suspicious, often-perplexed locals.

The fruits of their labors have been a feast for the lexicographically inclined ever since. What does a patient in the South mean when he complains of dew poison? What does a waitress in California mean when she offers you coffee and snails? Where would you go if a New Englander directed you to the willywags?

(Answers: The patient has a rash on his feet or legs. The waitress is offering you cinnamon rolls with your cup of joe. The New Englander means what others might call the boonies.)

As the repository of answers to such questions (the dictionary contains nearly 60,000 entries and is the only project of its type that is national in scope), the folks at DARE have long acted as a clearinghouse for all sorts of odd requests, by everyone from doctors to dialogue coaches to presidents.

Ms. Hall remembers a call she took in the early 1990s from a lawyer whose client had called a former girlfriend a mud flap. Could the phrase be used as a term of endearment?

“I could neither confirm nor deny,” said Ms. Hall, who searched DARE’s archives but found nothing. “It was only years later, driving down the highway behind a big truck, that I realized he may have been referring to those curvaceous silhouettes you see,” Ms. Hall said. “So, I suppose that could be complimentary.”

In 1992, a member of President George H.W. Bush’s staff called on Mr. Cassidy when the president baffled reporters by calling an argument over who had run the first negative ad of the campaign a case of “who shot John.” Mr. Cassidy found that the term originated with a children’s game, an Iowa variant is “who shot the bear,” and in southern Appalachia, who-shot-John is slang for corn whiskey, primarily moonshine.

The next year, reporters rang DARE when President Bill Clinton said a critic didn’t know him “from Adam’s off-ox.” The phrase turned out to be common west of the Appalachians, meaning, “he doesn’t know anything about me.”

DARE has even been used to solve crimes. Roger Shuy, a retired forensic linguist, recounted the case of a child abduction in which the kidnapper left a note demanding ransom of $10,000, directing: “Put it in the green trash kan on the devil strip” at the corner of two streets.

The kidnapper tried to disguise his education with “kan” (elsewhere spelling “precious” correctly), but devil strip is a term for the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway, one used solely in a small area around Akron. When law enforcement’s suspect list included just one educated man from Akron, the police got a confession.

Some linguists worry that television and the Internet will wash away America’s diverse regional vocabulary. The Subway sandwich chain, for instance, is eroding regionalisms like grinder (New England), hero (New York City), hoagie (Pennsylvania and New Jersey), zep (southeastern Pennsylvania) and spucky (Boston).

But new regionalisms are being minted. Relatively new (that is, in the last 40 years), the term skeevy has arisen primarily in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey to describe something gross or dirty. Out of Northern California, there has been hella, used as an intensifier, as in “that’s hella cool.”

Indeed, while some might find tweet-speak hella skeevy, it looks like the future of discovering regionalisms is online.

A paper from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 looked at regionalisms on Twitter, using geo-tagged posts. The authors found that while Northern Californians were hella tired, New Yorkers were deadass tired. And while sumthin’ means something in most cities, it is suttin’ in New York City.

Erin McKean, founder of online dictionary Wordnik, and a member of the DARE advisory board, said that Internet subcultures will increasingly be sources of new words. She points to a book, “Slayer Slang,” which cataloged the jargon of online fans of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” movie and TV show (e.g., slayage and Buffyverse).

“These words give us a sense of kinship and belonging,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if we live online all the time.”

While DARE isn’t ready to add the Buffyverse to its roster of regions, it is launching a digital version in 2013. Beyond that, Ms. Hall would like to field an updated language survey, which would be partly conducted online.

Ms. Hall said that she now has a new motto, paying homage to Mr. Cassidy (by way of Dr. Seuss): “On Beyond Zebra!” In the spirit of Volume V, Mr. Cassidy would surely be suffancified.

By NICK TIMIRAOS

The Federal Housing Administration will exhaust its reserves over the coming year, according to budget projections released Monday, which would require a Treasury infusion for the first time in its 78-year history.

But Obama administration officials said more recent developments, including fines that will go to the FHA from last week’s $25 billion mortgage settlement with five major banks, could cover any shortfall and obviate the need for taxpayer funding.

The FHA has burned through its reserves over the past three years as defaults mount on loans it guaranteed as housing markets deteriorated. FHA-backed mortgages are an attractive option for borrowers because they can make down payments as low as 3.5%. But as home prices continue to fall, many of those borrowers have fallen underwater, where they owe more than their homes are worth and are at greater risk of default if they experience income shocks.

The estimates by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget show that the FHA’s capital reserves, which stood at $4.7 billion in October, would be wiped out in the coming year, forcing the agency to seek nearly $700 million from the U.S. Treasury.

FHA officials said they could collect as much as $1 billion from last week’s settlement between federal agencies, 49 state attorneys general, and five banks as a result of false claims submitted to the agency.

“It’s highly unlikely that we’ll need any special assistance from the Treasury given the policy changes we’re making as well as the settlement dollars,” said Carol Galante, the FHA’s acting commissioner.

The FHA also plans to announce an increase in mortgage insurance premiums that it charges to borrowers later this month, Ms. Galante said. Those increases come on top of a 0.1 percentage point increase in premiums required last year by Congress.

A spokeswoman for the White House budget office said that its projections for the FHA’s reserves were “no longer accurate” as a result of last week’s bank settlement.

Any taxpayer assistance would be a watershed moment for the New Deal-era agency because it has always been self-funded. The FHA now backs nearly $1 trillion in mortgages, and more than 9% of those loans are at least three months past due.

The FHA doesn’t have to ask Congress for money if it runs out of cash. Instead, it has what is known as permanent and indefinite budget authority, giving it an effective credit line from the Treasury.

The FHA keeps two different reserve accounts—a primary account that must keep enough cash on hand to pay for all estimated losses on loans it has guaranteed, and a secondary account for reserves that exceed projected losses. Congress requires the FHA to have enough cash in the secondary account equal to 2% of all loan guarantees, a level that the agency breached in 2009.

The primary account had nearly $27 billion to cover all estimated losses at the end of September 2011, while the secondary account had nearly $4.7 billion for additional losses.

But the budget projections show that the FHA will exhaust that secondary account over the coming year as those funds are moved into the primary account. It will also need $688 million for the primary account, which covers projected losses on its current portfolio over 30 years.

The report estimates that the account would return to the black by October 2013, with around $8.3 billion in reserve, and that it would return to the mandatory 2% reserve level by 2015.

The agency—which played a small role in the housing market during the boom years because private sector lenders provided loans with far more generous terms—has become a major source of financing for home purchases since the mortgage meltdown.

The FHA doesn’t make loans but instead insures lenders against losses for mortgages that meet its standards. It makes money by charging upfront and monthly insurance premiums to borrowers. The agency said Monday it would increase the annual insurance premiums by one quarter of one percentage point for loans that exceed $625,500.

The FHA’s losses could expose yet another cost of the government’s extraordinary efforts to prevent a deeper housing downturn, fueling a debate over how much support should be provided to the housing market. Many economists worry that a sharp pullback by the FHA could choke off credit and send home prices lower. Ms. Galante said the agency is focused on minimizing any losses without constricting housing markets that are “still stressed.”

Loans guaranteed over the past two years are expected to turn a profit for the agency, but losses on loans insured between 2007 and 2009 are mounting. “It’s no surprise that the fund is under some level of stress” as a result, said Ms. Galante.

The report comes just weeks after President Barack Obama proposed an initiative to allow millions of home owners to refinance their mortgages through the FHA if they can’t currently qualify for low interest rates but are up to date on their loan payments.

The plan, which requires congressional action, would represent a dramatic expansion of the FHA by allowing the agency to refinance borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth. The White House says a levy on large financial institutions would create a separate reserve account used to protect taxpayers against losses from defaults.

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com