Writer's Words (page 9)

Now high school graduation is virtually automatic for adolescent outside the ghettos and barrios, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.

As long as we're on the subject, I want to put in a plug for buying a book: “The Insider's Guide to the Colleges.” It is more interesting and candid, and isn't one of those facts-and-figures books like Barron's, Petersons, etc. Go out and spend the $18 for a new copy - splurge! You will only go to college once!

From Mozart's Don Giovanni to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the figure of the libertine, that politically incorrect swine, has swaggered provocatively through 200 years of operatic history. Cads, bounders and rakehells abound onstage: one thinks not only of the lecherous Don and Tom Rakewell but of Nerone, Pinkerton and Eugene Onegin as well-moral reprobates who give hardly a second thought to the consequences of their actions.

A distressing number of my readers, however, evidently addled by the siren song of “the third word,” were unable to read my plea for surcease, and so the deluge of “gry” continued.

While staying at Manhattan's swank Mark Hotel,...

Surely there are other philosophies — Hitler and his epigones in Bosnia represent one...

It's a good bet that this Carrey — the ventriloquist who wonders poignantly if he has lost his own voice — is a bit of a gag too. The Canadian comic, 32, has been having too good a time lately to search for the Inner Jim. And so has anyone who has seen Carrey inhabit dozens of roles on Fox's prime-time skitcom In Living Color or commandeer the big screen in last winter's smash Ace Ventura Pet Detective. That rowdy farce, cagily directed by Tom Shadyac, earned $72 million at the domestic box office.

don't act like an expert when you're a tyro.

Even Thomas Jefferson had to contend with a group of drunken rowdies who caused a near riot at the school that he founded, the University of Virginia. Ever since then, periodic efforts to crack down on excessive alcohol consumption among young scholars have been largely futile.

In the days when execution was mainly a reprisal, inflicting maximum suffering was a legitimate objective.

Hanging developed tangentially from garroting and strangulation

Ever since the roaring critical and commercial success of The World According to Garp (1978), the arrival of a new John Irving novel has been an occasion for intense interest and sometimes febrile arguments. Irving fans applaud his jam-packed plots, his innocent heroes (the line from Garp to Gump is not hard to draw) and his overt, Dickensian sympathy for damaged or endangered children. Critics retort that Irving's heart may be in the right place, but his head is not — that he actually exploits for shock value the very characters whose welfare he pretends to champion.

For a few tense days last week, the prestige of the Russian space program — and the well-being of three cosmonauts — was in jeopardy as a planned rendezvous in orbit went suddenly awry. A Progress rocket laden with food and other vital supplies glided up to — and right past — the Mir space station. Ground controllers then made a second effort to dock the two craft, but failed. By late Friday afternoon, the Progress could make only one last pass; this time cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko would try to maneuver Mir into a favorable position. Finally, with no more room for error, Malenchenko hit his target and the ships linked up. Ordinarily, a few miscues with a resupply ship would not create such suspense. But a series of foul-ups had left the space station in a precarious state.

“Higher algebraic curves” would nowadays be subsumed under algebraic geometry ...

the slimy Dorian Tyrel (Peter Greene), who runs the Coco Bongo Club, where of course Tina is the slinky chanteuse.

Mercurial and erratic, Kim Jong Il rarely meets foreign dignitaries.

he surrounds himself with the scions of his father's wartime comrades

For when Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) charges Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) with harassment after he rejects her advances and then risks his future at DigiCom, the software company where they're jostling for position, by leveling the same charge at her, their case starts to become more singular than paradigmatic.