LEND ME YOUR EAR: CHRALES OSGOOD: EVERY SILVER LINING HAS A DARK CLOUD

Do teachers still tell their charges that the pun is the lowest lowest form of humor, as they did half a century ago? If so, protests and boos have done nothing to discourage addicts.

Today, even young children get into the act, be it consciously or through mishearing. Bil Keane often gives Dolly a hearing problem to get her to charm us with a pun. Recently, Dolly announced that her grandmother had to have an operation because she had a Cadillac in her eye. Betty Debnam runs a mini-joke section in her Mini Page with question-and-answer games to amuse readers young and old: "Q, What do you call someone who is crazy about walls? A A walnut."

For 15 years, a Pun-Off has been held in Austin, Texas, to raise money for the city's famous O. Henry Museum. A write-up in the Florida Times Union, (thanks again, Esther) bears the heading, "The pun is mightier than the sword." "It's jest for a wordy cause," explained a contestant as he flew in to perform before 2,000 spectators.

In an ecology survey on TV we witnessed a segment depicting bears. The narrator dwelt on the universal fear of bears, saying more people are killed by dogs than by bears but the whole world suffers from bearanoia. This effort probably elicited groans from some listeners, but as we have written before, it takes intellect to get two ideas into a single expression, however effortless. An acute ear also helps.

Political columnist Paul Greenberg has just come up with gliberal a combination of glib and liberal. Glib can mean anything from fluency to indicate deception to mindless. Whatever it means to us, Greenberg coined gliberal to characterize liberal extremists.

At the onset of Bill Clinton's campaign bus tour, newscasters reported that the presidential candidate would spend a week buscaping from New York to St. Louis. Whether the idea was intended to convey Clinton's desire to escape formalities by choosing bus over plane, or scape was employed to indicate stalking the prey, the expression met with instant approval.

Plays on words are not necessarily puns, but playing with words has always been a popular sport among people in every walk of life and better by far, readers must agree, than playing with guns. From a recent item in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, we garnered shootist and pistolero. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the fastest shootist in the world was a man named Bob Munden. Pistolero, derived from pistoleer (one armed with a pistol), was used to describe "the art of shooting a gun." All my life I've wondered why anyone would want to shoot a gun instead of shooting the enemy, but idiom has been shooting literal meanings ever since language replaced growls.

Diplotowing is another New Yorker find. It seems that in some European countries (or at least in one that eludes me), foreign diplomats have been borrowing parking spaces reserved for resident diplomats, and this practice has inspired a sign warning offenders they will be diplotowed if they usurp the space. Few diplomats visit Cape Girardeau so we have little need for the word but someone had fun making it up.

The term Democratchniks made a headline in a recent issue of Time magazine. The article presented a look at how Yeltsin and his rookies are trying to change Russia. The coinage was not used in a positive sense, but as Charles Osgood has remarked on Kuralt's Sunday Morning show, "Every silver lining has a dark cloud."

We thought of this some time back as we watched a docudrama featuring a group of music lovers who have become famous for making music without words. Instead of forming an orchestra, they have created a voic-es-tra, giving voice to well-known classics as well as improvising new music in various styles. No words and no orchestral accompaniment but just think. They've given audiences a truly descriptive term to describe their wordless productions!