LEND ME YOUR EAR: MET ANY "PLAGIARIZEES" LATELY?

Some time has passed since language experts decried the unnecessary use of "situation", but the habit is still alive and well. On a talk show last week, the host explained how to act "if someone has verbally abused you in a management situation." His advice was a response to a lady's complaint that her employer and his secretary abused her verbally at every turn. Wouldn't it have been simpler for the host to have retained the lady's terminology?

On a documentary about the shortage of doctors in a small Texas town, we heard that "It takes hours just to get a doctor to a clinic situation." Distance was the problem, and "situation" added nothing but an instance of tautology.

Another increasingly popular word I've railed against for years is "enthuse." Dictionaries tell us "enthuse" is a back-formation from "enthusiasm", and the abbreviated form "is not used by writers of taste." In my day, teachers created "enthusiasm" for proper usage by rendering their charges "enthusiastic", but today, everyone has to verbalize nouns and adjectives, and "enthuse" was bound to experience a strong comeback.

Although the suffix "dom" has been attached to nouns since the advent of English witness kings and kingdoms, dukes and dukedoms divadom is a new one on me. Not content with stars and stardoms, a critic wrote of a new Hollywood star: "On the Richter scale of divadom, this is a major quake." In my view, divadom looks better in print than it sounds. Play with the sound, and what do you come up with?

"Porterage" for portage cropped up in a recent travel folder. I couldn't find "porterage" in any dictionary I own, but if I were traveling I'd settle for either spelling. I haven't forgotten how difficult it was to find a porter in Germany in 1970. By then Germany had become so affluent that young men no longer aspired to so lowly a vocation: they were all college professors.

An unidentified language comic is said to have written to a friend: "If I am guilty of plagiarism, my apologies to the plagiarizee." If you know the word plagiarize, you understand the coinage but try to pronounce "plagiarizee". Even so, it's our least likely -ize word of the month, and any day now, someone might sue us for appropriating it.

Two or more evenings back, we heard a talk show hostess remark: "This is the worst case of lechism I've ever heard." "Lechism", we gather, is an extension of lech or letch. Somehow I favor lecherism not the practice, just the word. Probably because it's more commonly used.

On Crossfire recently, a co-anchor closed the session with: "It doesn't matter to me. I'm unpartial." Un partial? This is almost as bad as something I read in a newspaper last night: "Although sports are a part of school life, they are being given undo importance." Perhaps we should just undue this comment.

In a recent ad section of a newspaper, blackberries were advertised for sale: "Blackberry plants $1.50 each less 10 percent ten or more. These are thornless and propose large berries." How do you propose large berries? Did the grower mean "promise"? What was once a marriage proposal has now become a "promise", so perhaps propose isn't too far off. Just another instance of the almost-right word, and you know what Mark Twain had to say about that: the difference is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

One less familiar word that has been in the news lately is "alluvial", an adjective used to describe the rocky soil around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Alluvial deposits could contain diamonds, so add the word to your vocabulary. It might come in handy next time you feel rich enough to invest in a diamond. Just tell the jeweler or clerk to show you something in the alluvial line. It will increase his interest in you as a customer and could prompt him to show you everything in the store!