LEND ME YOUR EAR: STOP THE LANGUAGE BUS, I WANT TO GET BACK ON!

It's easy to understand why so many teachers abandon the fold in favor of a more satisfying career. Especially English teachers. I was tempted to drop this column after hearing a young man boast that his wife "carpools and safety-belts the children." The fashion of turning nouns into verbs is no excuse for mass production, I surmised, and I felt I could no longer cope.

On second thought, what would I do with all the lopsided expressions and startling coinages in my notebooks if I went AWOL? Why deprive readers of the joy of sharing? Sharing is what life is all about, n'est-ce pas? Surely some examples in the collection will amuse friends of Real English in case we sever connections.

From a CNN report, we learned of a belated award about to be bestowed on a war hero whose name had been omitted from a memorial wall. When a bystander asked the man's name, the officer in charge explained: "What we'll do is input his name in a section that will designate his rank."

This application of "input," a term I had never used, tickled my funny bone despite the circumstance, and I laughed so hard I felt ashamed of myself and had to pray to be forgiven.

Next on my list of examples is another that is equally tantalizing. In a televised feature covering a school auction of items long-since discarded by educationists, the auctioneer was required to explain why one special item had been removed from the auction block. The bids had come like lightning, and the frantic bidders had had to stop bidding. No one could afford to win!

"We try to get as much biddity in as we can," the auctioneer sighed in frustration.

"Biddity"? I asked him without speaking.

This smooth talker was probably not an official auctioneer, but I didn't know anyone in tune with auction lingo, either. "Biddity" is missing from all standard dictionaries. "Biddability" is included, though I can't imagine why.

On Capitol Hill, a debate between Democrats and Republicans about smoking prompted one politician to declare they would have to "arrogate" the decisions of both parties until agreement could be reached. The disappointed loser surely meant "abrogate." "Arrogate" means to keep on squabbling. To stoop to the vernacular, "abrogate" denotes a "done deal." Close, but no cigar, as a die-hard might whisper in No-Smoking territory.

But not all our examples are of negative impact. A seasoned critic with a tendency to pun, referring to the actor who plays the part of Harry Truman in the docudrama at the Harry Truman Newseum, pronounced the actor's performance "Trumendous." We suspected the critic was the same person who coined "Newseum," and a punster who makes sense to us is jolly good company.

On a TV docu displaying the statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt, another fluent coinmaster dubbed the statue "a very messagorial memorial." To my knowledge, "messagorial" has not found its way to Dictionaryland, but we noted a tongue-in-cheek manner in the speaker's delivery and felt certain he was just having fun with the rhyme. I doubt he considered "messagorial" linguistically pictorial.

In a demonstration of a new exercise device, a young man shows how it differs from earlier models. The emcee said it offers more "mobability." The extra syllable in "mobility" was eliminated ages ago, but obviously no one lived long enough to return to the auction floor in 1997 with the news.

Most astonishing catch of this season comes from a young radio staffer: "A man fell off a tractor who was damaged." I gathered it was the man who was damaged, not the tractor. A tractor, young man, is not a "who" in our books, a tractor is a "which" or a "that." Only human beings deserve the relative pronoun "who," and a tractor is no relative of mine.

But thank God I got off the language bus without falling off.

Last week was Random Acts of Kindness Week, and my return to the world of REAL language may be my only contribution. In fact, it may be my last before the Internet and Web Site declare REAL ENGLISH obsolete.

adl dot xyz dot com.

Aileen Lorberg is/was a language columnist for the Southeast Missourian.