LEND ME YOUR EAR: ACCIDENTAL AND INCIDENTAL LEARNING

As everyone who reads these columns can verify, I learn something new every day. Usually, what I learn has to do with words, and is the result of discussions about usage.

Sometimes, realization is late in coming. Upon seeing my last column in print, I discovered opposite meanings in "execution." To execute a criminal is to put an end to his life, but to execute a project means to cause it to materialize. When I wrote that my 1987 New Year's Resolutions had yet to be executed I meant I hadn't used them. For clarity's sake, that's what I should have said.

Some time back, I gave our pastor credit for having created the term "devilution." Recently, I came across "devolution" and wondered whether that was the spelling Pastor Dissen was thinking of. "Devolution" is defined as the passing down of stages, or the delegating of office by a superior to one of lesser status. In biology, however, it refers to degeneration as distinguished from evolution. Still, our pastor was speaking of devil's work, and I prefer to believe he was making a play on words and changed the spelling mentally to accentuate the devil in it.

Recently, I heard of a newborn child who had been named Nazareth. The little one's grandmother, who knew Nazareth was the town in which Jesus grew up, asked whether there was a deeper meaning. On doing the research, I learned that Nazareth is Hebrew for "watchtower" or "the brow of a hill." Quite a name to live up to, but the grandmother and I believe the boy-child has inherited the right genes.

Not long ago, Time magazine published an article about a newly-discovered gene found in the brains of birds, a gene that gives them an extra sense of direction. These genes are called "magnetites", but no one knows whether they are present in the brains of human beings. I could swear by all that's holy that they are absent from mine. Any time there's a wrong way to go anywhere, that's the way I go. An observant receptionist at Family Physician's Group in Cape Girardeau will bear me out in this.

In an earlier column, I expressed my dislike of teenage trolls because I was against anything ugly. Later, I decided all trolls are so ugly they are downright cute, and deserve to be collectibles. However, I am still offended by the current trend toward the ugly by the degrading distortions of human faces pervading all printed matter today. Political cartoons have always been devastatingly exaggerated, but I see no humor in the drawings that make everyone look like a criminal or a freak.

To counteract this trend, I sometimes receive requests that add humor and spice to my life. In a Christmas greeting, two truth-searching cousins wrote that they were looking forward to my resolving a longtime family debate when we got together at Christmas. Leonard and Janet Lorberg Fiedler needed to know whether the expression is "in like Flynn" or "in like flint." Leonard wrote: "People 25 years or younger say it's Flynn, and the older folks say flint."

Although I'm too ancient ever to have heard the expression, a close friend who will never see 25 again but doted on Errol Flynn in her youth called to assure me "in like Flynn" is the winner. It's a distinct advantage to have friends and relatives ranging in age from a few months to almost 100.

According to my notes, someone has sent out an SOS for the meaning of "itzennacking." This is said to be a term appearing early on in a Cracker Jack jingle. The worrier wrote that it went "something like" lip-smacking, scalawagging, paddywhacking, itzennacking cracker-jacking Cracker Jack. A respondent who had been taking part in a Civil War reconstruction project maintained that carpet-bagging had also been included.

Any Civil War scholar out there in a position to settle this all-important dispute? Don Higginbotham, where are you when our history books need you?