Jargon

Once again, people are telling school officials to cut out the jargon.A group of business people told school administrators Friday that the list of "exit outcomes" they are presenting to the public would get a much better reception if the list were written in plain language.Parents have been saying much the same thing at meetings held especially for them by the Carroll Council of PTAs."You must explain what you mean in the language," said Pat Donoho, manager of compensation and benefits at Random House.

Chris Williams appreciates plush surroundings. In December, he and his wife, Alice, stayed in a $350-a-night Ritz-Carlton in Florida. "Marble everything," he said. But last month, the couple from Rome, Ga., decided on the Holiday Inn Express Hollywood, where room rates recently ran as little as $104 per night, for their five-day getaway to Los Angeles. "It's nice to live in luxury," said Williams, who supervises technicians at a cable TV company. "But it's not feasible." Millions of frugal travelers agree.

Acting on residents' complaints about heavy narcotics activity, city and Housing Authority police officers posed as drug dealers at an East Baltimore intersection yesterday afternoon and arrested 39 suspected buyers, police said.Sgt. David H. Childs, head of the Police Department's Eastern District drug enforcement unit, said 27 men and 12 women -- most from East Baltimore and a few from Essex, Dundalk and Middle River in eastern Baltimore County -- were each charged with drug offenses and were being held at the Central Booking and Intake Center downtown pending bail hearings.

You log onto Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, looking to burn off the day's tensions by refighting a few small-unit skirmishes from World War II. But it's no fun when the n00bs and griefers are out in force. Half the guys on your fireteam are llamas, total smacktards who couldn't hit the side of a barn with a BFG, much less a standard assault rifle. And the other half committed so many TKs they might as well have been fighting on the other side. All in all, a lousy night's computer gaming.

ENTERTAINMENT, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And since retirement I've found the principal source of my entertainment to be television -- particularly the weather reports, commercials and talks shows.When I was in college I read an essay by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in which the Cambridge don defined "jargon" as the effect of writing around a subject rather than approaching it directly. (George Orwell noted the same thing a half-century ago, and his spirit lives on in the "Quarterly Review of Doublespeak," published by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Q: My son told me I should put my stock certificates in a brokerage account.He said a new regulation will reduce the settlement period and could create problems for me.I'm happy keeping my stock in a bank safety-deposit box and collecting the dividends myself. What is this new law? When does it go into effect? Will it hurt me? What do you recommend I do?A: I've always been in favor of keeping stocks in a brokerage account, preferably at a discount brokerage firm that does not charge an annual fee or an "inactive" account fee.The new rule your son mentioned -- called "T-Plus-Three" in Wall Street jargon -- tightens the current five-day settlement period for trades to three days and takes effect June 7, 1995.

Brady Daniller can speed read -- or spread, as it is called in debate jargon -- with the best of them. The Wilde Lake High School sophomore said he capitalizes on his ability to talk fast to cram all of his ideas into six minutes of allotted speaking time. But one of the judges at Saturday's debate competition at Loyola Blakefield in Towson said there is often an accompanying strategy behind that technique. "Spreading allows you to run your arguments rapidly past your opponent, so he or she has a difficult time absorbing them all," said Teresa Needer, a math teacher at Towson High.

The most famous lead in sportswriting is Grantland Rice's account of Notre Dame's football victory over Army in 1924: "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. "In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden." What would he write today? "Cool as the other side of the pillow, Brady Quinn avoided a big USC rush to hit Jeff Samardzija on a deep pass as Notre Dame fans shouted, `He ... could ... go ... all ... the ... way.'" Or something like that.

John Madden, it turns out, has a philosophy. And it can be summed up neatly, as most things in life can, in the words of a pop song:Sha la la la la la, live for today.Sha la la la la la, live for today.And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey.As Madden approaches his last NFL game with CBS for the foreseeable future, he says he hasn't been looking much past doing Sunday's NFC championship between the Cowboys and 49ers with his partner of 13 years, Pat Summerall. After that, there is the matter of where football's best analyst will be employed next season, but Madden said he really hasn't been thinking about it."

Mary Sue Welcome did not come to talk, as the psychiatrists did, about borderline personality disorders, suicidal ideation or therapeutic alliances.Instead, she spoke in personal terms of "My Jackie," the best friend whose public facade of stylish self-assurance obscured a private life marked by loneliness and fear of failure.As comptroller of Baltimore, Jacqueline F. McLean could be so impatient and sharp-tongued that many gave her wide berth. But Ms. Welcome's Jackie was a social misfit who pined for a better marriage and kept a bottle of vodka in her refrigerator to numb her despair.