`STYLEHOOD FOR THE NEW YEAR'

Weeks before the New Madrid Fault was expected to quake, a word-conscious critic announced that the advance warning was not a prediction, it was only a projection. I consulted American Heritage about "projection" and settled for number 3: "a plan for an anticipated course of action." Number 7 seemed to be the choice of many: "the naive or unconscious attribution of one's own feelings.

One critic surmised that Iben Browning was over-confident in his "guesstimate," and a good many residents of New Madrid turned the whole event into a holiday. Others took the threat seriously, and at least discovered what the real thing would involve. The motto of the U.S. Coast Guard, Semper paratus (Latin for "always prepared") cannot be taken lightly at any time.

On the more immediate question of impending war with Iran, a senator of note announced that Saddam Hussein "has nothing that could be 'weaponized.'" Martha Duffy, a novelist and guest on a talk show, created another "-ize" word by explaining that "facts are `dignitized' to protect the sinful." How well our Congress and courts of law understand the process.

Still "-izing" around, the author of The Annals of Art in the Nov. 12 New Yorker wrote: "Rows of identical Victorian facades resembled vertical moraines or upended brickfields, each one a jaunty tryout of some historicizing style." "Historicizing," in my view, was another jaunty tryout.

Dipping further into the Annals of Art, we read a strange description of the art of the early twentieth-century artist David Momberg: "Jerusalem appears in his canvases as an inhabited ruin, an elaborate systems of oubliettes." Stumped by "oubliettes" as applied to style in painting, I was anything but comforted by a dictionary definition: "a dungeon in the trapdoor of a ceiling as its only means of entrance or exit."

Reading on, I learned that Bomberg, for all his success as a great teacher and painter, painted his depression into his pictures, so that the term "Bombergism" evolved "to define the painting of feeling into the paint patch." I thought painting feeling into one's work was what great art was all about, but every "school" has to be individually identified, if only through the use of -isms or -izes.

New words being a never-ending trend, the Sears company sent out a circular some weeks ago announcing that they never produce anything "negatory." All they were trying to get across was that quality is their trademark, but writers of commercials have to get into the act. I felt the writer of this one might have attempted something more "positivatory."

Quality Paperback is advertising a new book about mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. The author, John Allen Paulos, has titled it INNUMERACY. How delightful to discover a book about a serious problem with a title suggesting the author has a sense of humor!

Somewhere I've read of a writer who made up the work "listomania" to describe the American mania for making lists. I confess to the habit. How could I compose these columns without lists, scrambled though they often turn out to be.

On a documentary picturing the evil infecting the youth of Rio de Janiero, the commentator stated that "most kids won't survive this stylehood." "Stylehood" is another new one on me, and hardly an apt creation to transmit a verbal image of the lives of young hoodlums. "Style" is the last word we'd apply to hoods of any age or nation.

News of the linking of the English with France under the English Channel was bound to trigger the word "chunnel." Having crossed the channel from Calais to Dover two decades ago, I waxed a bit nostalgic as I watched the Frenchmen and Englishmen shake hands through the first gap in the tunnel and was delighted to no end when a British newsman announced "the light at the end of the chunnel."

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, a brief item on the recycling of glass gave us the word "glassphalt" inspired by the notion of adding glass to asphalt for paving some of the rundown streets of New York City. The process, we are told, is economical, long-lasting and it sparkles. At this writing, it has even spread its sparkles through Times Square.

May your New Year sparkle with more than colored glass, and may your 1991 "stylehood" be richly rewarded.