LEND ME YOUR EAR: REWARDS NOT ALWAYS TANGIBLE

If it hadn't happened to me, I'd swear no one could have had a pronoun changed to a preposition without certain disaster.

Remember "Acronyms are getting my goat"? The sentence ending "I may confuse readers by writing it SFA" came out "I may confuse readers by writing of SFA." Neither Smoke Free America nor the substitution caused the slightest damage!

This was a first for me, but I'm not searching for additional examples, or suggesting that anyone try. What I'm saying is that anything can happen, even to words in syntactical relationships.

Anything almost did happen, in a previous column. A friend who knows no more about sports than I sent an article about Wilt Chamberlain, the world's most famous basketball player. Chamberlain was visiting his alma mater for the first time in years, and the article began: "Wilt Chamberlain couldn't get open yesterday." My friend had written in the margin: "Couldn't get what?"

Autograph seekers had the visitor so locked-in, he couldn't get through to the auditorium to address them. It suddenly occurred to me that "open" might be sportsland idiom, as in the French Open. I checked with American Heritage and a man called Peter, then deleted the reference. What an opportunity my fellow critics missed!

Shortly before this, my column on how words change in meanings caused concern for another dear friend. She wrote me that the German word for "boy" is knobe, not "knave." I don't know German and was trying to explain that originally, "knave" meant "boy" in English and still does in German. Somehow I failed to make this clear to a gifted soulmate.

The June issue of Reader's Digest carried an article titled "What Every Free-Lancer Knows," condensed from The Wall Street Journal. The author, Benjamin J. Stein, wrote of the many problems peculiar to free-lancers. First, we must produce something to draw a paycheck. Other office workers can sit at a desk and shoot the breeze with the boss and get paid. Regularly. The free-lancer may get four checks one week, then none for a year. We also have to pay for our office supplies, whereas other office workers get pens, paper, even the use of computers and fax machines without cost.

Worse still, our markets may vanish with a change of editors or the demise of a publication. How well I know! When Woman's Day changed food editors, the successor didn't share my appetite for the recipes I was creating. When the editor of Educational Forum lost his temper and left in a huff, he took every manuscript with him. As a result, only Part I of my four-parter on theories and techniques of the comic saw the light of day, and payment was on publication.

Moreover, to continue to sell, the free-lancer must innovate. "Lend Me Your Ear" began with little more than textbook material, and readers kept notebooks for reference. But the language columnist must produce more than can be gleaned from textbooks. I watch or listen, or both, to hours of newscasts. I comb the best magazines on the market for examples of good and not-so-good spoken and written English, then consult dozens of references to verify or discredit whatever. Believe me, it's a full-time job to produce a column that often amounts to no more than two double-spaced pages.

To save time also to have company I gather much of my material at mealtime, but this isn't always wise or helpful. Once, a documentary featuring Africa's starving children played havoc with my conscience and appetite, and for relief I switched to Sesame Street only to come eyeball to eyeball with a big fat orange worm crawling out of a lady's carefully crafted coiffure!

By now it must be apparent that free-lance writers are not the independent creatures most people picture and envy. But we who work with words place our love for the language above monetary and social rewards. And as Benjamin J. Stein made clear in his splendid explication, all the uncertainty connected with free-lancing works to our advantage: "It teaches lessons ... that other workers and their managers would do well to learn."