LOCAL WRITER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST LOVE LANGUAGE

In "Eighty Four Charing Cross Road," the business correspondence between a New York City writer and a London bookseller flowers into a 20-year trans-Atlantic friendship as they reveal themselves to each other through their mutual love for books.

Cape Girardeau writer Aileen Lorberg and nationally-syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick have based a similar liaison on their affection for the English language.

Lorberg has written a language column, Lend Me Your Ear, since 1982. The column currently appears every other week in the Southeast Missourian. Kilpatrick retired his political column Dec. 31 after 28 years but continues to produce a weekly language column, Writer's Art.

The 82-year-old Lorberg calls their relationship "a literary affair."

Their correspondence began in 1983 when she sent him a column written as a tribute to her brother, M.G. She said the column was inspired by Kilpatrick's annual birthday letter to his first grandchild, Heather. Lorberg didn't even know he was writing a language column at the time.

Kilpatrick responded, but Lorberg says their correspondence was indifferent at first. "I told him these thank-yous for thank-yous will have to stop because neither of us has the time."

But later that year, then-Associate Circuit Judge Bill Rader drove her to Columbia to hear Kilpatrick speak.

Lorberg vividly recalls their introduction at a church. "I fell at his feet," she said. "I tripped on the third step."

Lorberg does consider Kilpatrick a minor god, but she also was ill from some shrimp that sneaked into her salad earlier in the day.

In a subsequent letter, Kilpatrick wrote, "I do hope you have recovered fully from the indigestion that done you in, and that you will never again look a shrimp in the eye, or wherever you look at a shrimp with the intention of spurning him."

Their brief exchange of words in Columbia constitutes their only meeting. But their letters became both more frequent up to one a week and more familiar.

Usually the topic has been language. Once there was a phone call for help from the East Coast when his publisher was desperate for a clarification.

Language-lovers discuss things like the correctness of the sentence, "Nobody here but us chickens." They ask each other questions like, "...is minimercial your neologism?"

But that mutual love of language has evolved into a friendship.

One year she wrote him that she wasn't in the mood to put up a Christmas tree. A table-size pine arrangement soon arrived from Kilpatrick.

Through the past 10 years, Kilpatrick's language column occasionally has lauded Lorberg's work. In a piece published in December, Kilpatrick wrote, "She writes the best language column in the country..."

He and New York Times' grammar guru William Safire aren't quite as good, Kilpatrick said by phone from his home in Charleston, S.C.

Lorberg's approach to language is delightfully free of pedantry, Kilpatrick said.

"She approaches it with the teacher's eye but has a writer's appreciation of the play in the joints of the language."

He asks about her health during the conversation, then concludes, "She does a good, spunky column and she does it with high, good humor."

Indeed, humor was the topic of Lorberg's master's thesis at the University of Southern California. When her column's plump for a classical education, she's talking about being able to quote W.C. Fields, Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker as well as Shakespeare.

Lorberg maintains she's not as funny as she used to be, then glibly tells about the boy who read "Hamlet" "but didn't like it because it was full of cliches."

A graduate of the Southeast Missouri State Teacher's College in 1934, Lorberg taught high school in Clayton, Mo., until she came down with tuberculosis. She nearly died, and says, "I was never able to go back to full-time anything, and they didn't want me for half-time anything."

So she became a writer, specializing early in her career in literature for teenagers. "It was another way of teaching," she said.

She calls herself a born teacher. "My first day of school I came home and started teaching my dolls instead of playing with them," she said.

Lorberg does not shrink from correcting anyone's misuse of the language. She wrote President Ronald Reagan to shape up his penchant for saying, "There's no sense in me doing that." "My" is correct.

And her letter apparently cured President George Bush of saying "try and" instead of the correct "try to."

It's doubtful she and Kilpatrick will ever meet again, Lorberg says. She no longer travels, and Kilpatrick is busying himself with a new column about the courts and with teaching a graduate course in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In "Eighty Four Charing Cross Road," Helene Hanss and Frank Doel never meet. Their words are their bond.