LEND ME YOUR EAR: WRITING THAT MAKES US "LISTEN UP"

The importance of the ear in writing and speaking is implicit in our all-over title. William F. Buckley Jr., as a consultant for The American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition), writes: "To slur language is as painful to the well-tempered ear as it is to music."

As faithful readers of "Lend Me Your Ear" know, James Kilpatrick sings the same song by example. All authorities on English usage stand reasonably tall in this regard. Today, as a thank-offering to other skillful writers perhaps less well-known to some, let me share just a sampling of the nuggets they have provided for this column.

Sally Tisdale, in her widely-acclaimed "Northwest Passage," writes: "I could see the stubbly corduroy of a Christmas tree field and the gentle rise of the hills to the distant white peak of Mount Hood ... This spherical universe wrapped layer around layer with the cunning of nesting dolls." If Sally Tisdale is not a poet by choice, let us nominate her for the post.

Zoe Heller, writing in November Vanity Fair, paints an eye-catching, ear-striking portrait of the great eccentric Robert Altman: "Altman is a long, stout man with a white goatee, and a lingering twang of Missouri in his vowels ... (he) has the sort of bronchial seal cry one associates with 19th-century tubercular poets." Obviously, Zoe Heller is another writer with an ear as keen as her eye.

In National Geographic, November issue, Associate Editor Robert M. Poole behaves like a poet in a wholly captivating feature on Labrador: "Waves of fog break at the foot of Labrador's craggy northern coast ... Dark closed like a lid on the mountains, shutting out the world, and the stars blazed to life in a sky suddenly too dark to hold them." Took the breath out of me just to copy the words!

Eons ago, in a course called The English Humorists at Southern Cal, Dr. Frank Baxter averred that "to be poetic for an hour would blast one to cinders." Recollecting this warning, I have chosen a bit from writer-entertainer Jeffrey Toobin, featured in the Oct. 18 New Yorker. Describing the audience at the annual PEN/FAULKNER Awards show, Toobin wrote: "Several writerly antennae seemed to rise when Justice David Souter started asking questions about what sounded like Jiggles Factors." The author left the Jiggles to our imagination. I've never met a Jiggle, but I'd hear it if it jiggled on paper.

Art Garfunkel, in "Walking America," says he is still walking -- still trying to find America. In his ongoing effort, he vows he has developed "interspecies communications with cows" ... and is "now seeking the cow frequency with the long `moo' sounds in bass." He could probably find the beastly sounds he is still walking for in much of what passes for music today, though it is unfair of me to say so without having done the needed research.

Rita Dove, America's new poet laureate, has written: "A good poet is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it."

Let me suggest that if you have to go easy on salt and are not diabetic, Andes chocolate mints are tastier and require no hot water if the chef slips hot pepper into your soup without your having ordered it. Mexico has won lands down over the American foods industry, no matter where NAFTA lands us.

Patrick J. Buchanan, more given to political frenzy than to metaphor, began his Nov. 10 column with: "Never before has such an unbroken necklace of defeats been hung about the neck of a new president." An excellent lead and a great win for the passive voice, whatever Buchanan's ratings as a politician.

Last week, Ellen Goodman devoted her weekly column to the ever-increasing intricacies of the new technology. "Databits are clogging our arteries," she mourned. "What we are looking at is not facts, but meaning."

Amen to that. But this humble scribe takes comfort in the thought that no living human brain can be replicated. Until the new technocrats come up with another Jesus Christ, another Voltaire, or another Jean Valjean, I have no fear of having our arteries clogged by software and intricate wiring.

In consequence of which, I herewith extend my sincere wish for a blessed Thanksgiving to everyone who writes the old-fashioned way, to technophiles attempting to rewire our brain waves, to everyone else who writes or does not write -- and to the multitudes who seem to listen up only when they answer the phone.