LEND ME YOUR EAR: STRIVE NOT TO BE `SCRIBBLATIVE'

Probably no one has been more critical than I of the universal habit of turning verbs into nouns, nouns and adjectives into verbs, izing everything that can be ized, and reversing the natural order of a phrase.

I still see no point in a young lady's saying she likes to bicycle-ride if she likes to ride a bicycle; in a newsman's reporting that missiles are incoming when they're coming in; or of planes overflying the Persian Gulf if they're flying over.

Yet, when a champion golfer (Juli Engster) said, "My daughter big-smiles at me," her voice projected so much feeling, I fell in love with both mother and daughter. I smiled big when a local weatherman announced, "Tomorrow it will begin to sun." When John Leo asked his readers' permission to "downshift" briefly to previously spoken words, I took it in stride. But didn't he mean "backshift"?

Last week, a column titled "It's time to rebel against absurdities of Newthink," by James Kilpatrick, appeared in this newspaper. I chuckled over Newthink because I considered it another intentional absurdity, a natural outgrowth of Newspeak. In "The Writer's Art" dated Feb. 3, the author presented another collection of undocumented ize words, among them corporatize, soldierize, mathematize, incentivize, statementize and if you want to laugh until you cry (or shout yourself hoarse), feast your eyes on sardineization.

Quoting from the World Herald, Kilpatrick gave us a sentence written to the editor about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: "NASA tries to answer the question of how we can live and work together without the sardineization of Earth's most populated cities." "I would can that one," wrote the columnist. "In Iraqi oil," let me add somewhat belatedly.

The only notable new ize word I've found in print lately is fetishization. It appeared in The New Yorker in an article about fetish worship in a community allowing itself to be ruled and ruined by the practice. With a mouthful such as fetishization to describe it, is it any wonder?

Glocalization came my way through a handful of clippings from my Philadelphia friend Anita. It was among Words to Watch in the last December issue of U.S. News and World Report, and was used to denote the practice of delegating decisions to local managers. A good word for a debatable idea.

In an editorial in Philadelphia Inquirer, Anita underlined the term glitterati an appropriate designation for society women who always show up at a gala, whatever the purported cause. From the same source (Anita) came scribblative not a dictionary term, but a splendid coinage for verbose and hastily-written writing.

To my intense satisfaction, we language detectives are still able to track down writing that gives us hope for the future. A writer for Time referred to a small town in Montana as "a hiccup of a town." The article featured a one-room school in the town and was extremely complimentary, so no offense was intended by the author's staccato portrayal.

Another contributor to Time pictured France's best actor (Gerard Depardieu) as "one who can swagger sitting down."

Peter Brown, in a first-person story in The New Yorker, wrote of a lady with an endearing laugh: "I liked the way her laugh rolled up inside her." Edith Oliver, reviewing the book "About Time," commented, "Elderly couples seem to be ice-skating on a pond of panic."

John Leonard, movie critic on Sunday Morning, referred to the character played by Dianna Riggs in Mystery as "the actress who tosses men as if they were salads."

On a TV special featuring a musician whose role model was Paul Hindemith, the interviewer said to the guest performer, "You seem to have tried to set phone books to music." Perhaps you need to know Hindemith's penchant for dissonance to enjoy this barb to the fullest.

Setting phone books to music may be easier than "trying to put a hat on a mule." This was Kilpatrick's ear-shattering thought about writers "who try to dress up a worn-out cliche." Few of us are blessed with the imagination of this master of prose. But at least we can continue to study the masters, and learn from them not to wind up practicing scribblatism.