To excuse something, such as slight offense or an error, is to regard or judge it with forgiveness or indulgence: please excuse Cookie Monster’s bad manners. More commonly, however, excuse is paired with me and used as a polite expression when addressing a stranger, interrupting or disagreeing with someone, or requesting repetition of what has just been said: Excuse me, did you say there are no cookies left? The synonym pardon overlaps with excuse in both of these senses, but with slight variations. Like excuse, pardon implies being lenient on a matter, though it usually applies to a specific act of lenience or mercy by an official or superior: the governor was asked to pardon the condemned. Informally, pardon is used to ask for courteous allowance for something: Pardon me, madam, I did not mean to make you drop your cookie!

Happiness—and we’ll try not to get too philosophical here—is the quality or state of being delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: seeing her family reunited brought her great happiness. It often results from the possession or attainment of what one considers good. Bliss is happiness on overdrive. The good feelings implied by the noun bliss surpass those associated with regular, run-of-the-mill contentment. If someone describes an experience as pure bliss, for instance, it means that the experience transported them to a state of complete and utter joy. In some uses, the term has spiritual associations, denoting the joy of heaven or heaven itself: the road to eternal bliss.

To transform something is to change it in form, appearance, or structure (to transform soybeans into oil and meal by pressure). This verb is often used to talk about changes of a less visible nature: technological advancements in the last few decades have transformed society. The synonym metamorphose means the same thing on paper, but it’s far less common and it typically alludes to the biological process of metamorphosis, that is, a profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism, as from the caterpillar to the pupa and from the pupa to the adult butterfly. Metamorphose is further distinguished from transform by its association with the supernatural, as in the case of the suspected wood nymphs in Adam Bede (George Eliot, 1859), that metamorphose themselves into a squirrel and scamper away.