LETTERS: USE OF WORDS IS FASCINATING TOPIC

To the editor:

Thank you for your recent column regarding detention vs. retention. My husband and I had been talking about the use of that word in headlines and stories in your paper.

Detention, in my mind, had to do with a juvenile lockup, while retention had to do with holding back, among other things, floodwaters. I told my husband, "The editor has to be choking on his bagel this morning," since I assumed some innocent, well-meaning reporter had used the wrong word. And then I noticed the word "detention" used on a pie chart of stats and info in the background of a photo on the subject.

So you cleared it all up for us when you addressed the subject in your column, although I still think the word "detention" sounds lame when talking about a flood basin. What do I know about that when I'm from the landlocked center of Iowa?

Word usage or misusage continues to fascinate me. My husband was reading the most recent issue of Car and Driver when I heard him exclaim, "My God, can't people spell anymore?" He was reading about a comparison study of four pickups, and such and such was the "first one out of the shoot."

Shoot?

And a recent Newsweek, in a review of the Mel Gibson movie, "The Patriot," depicts the movie as "this epic may take us into unchartered waters ... ."

Unchartered?

It makes for entertaining reading, sort of a like a search-a-word puzzle.

By the way, I am waiting to see the July 4 copy of Time magazine to see if they will do as I suspect, and that's a civic-hatchet job on the fair town of Cape. Reading accounts of the town meeting Time hosted, the after-hours tete-a-tete and your assessment of the magazine and its chief (which, incidentally, was hilarious), I doubt if a cheerful, sunny, positive story will come out of it.

As a recent transplant from Iowa, the caucus state, where the media from all over descend every four years to see what they can do to make Iowans look like idiots out slopping hogs or cooking up a batch of meth while the out-of-town reporters complain they can't find a decently mixed drink or a hot-off- the-press New York Times -- well, we learned to be wary around them.

LINDA BANGER

Burfordville, Mo.