Unspeakable

BOSTON -- It is a story too terrible to tell, and it was taking place on a gray day along Cambridge streets where innocence and trust were stolen by two degenerate predators who allegedly kidnapped, killed, and sexually abused 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley.With the boy's body still somewhere under the Piscataqua River between Maine and New Hampshire, his name lived in every conversation in all the homes along Bristol and Hampshire streets."The two of them planned this," a detective was saying.

Like many Americans, I often wished I could learn another language, preferably by not trying very hard. Greek in 10 easy lessons, perhaps. Not the language of laurel-wreathed Aeschylus Thucydides, but the speech of baggage handlers or taxi drivers at the Athens airport.One day a couple of years ago, the opportunity fell into my hands, through the mail slot of my front door like an ad for a pizza purveyor or a catch-basin cleaner: "Learn Easy Conversational Greek in 10 Easy Lessons."The invitation listed the address of the local community center.

The apology for Japan's wartime atrocities a half century ago made by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama has already produced good results. Asian governments have welcomed it. Japanese citizens have begun a long-suppressed national dialogue on the rights and wrongs of it. Mr. Murayama has started a long-delayed healing process with Asian neighbors that Japan conquered and destroyed in the 1930s and '40s."

If he has done nothing else for his country, Tomiichi Murayama, the weak Socialist prime minister of Japan, has begun a long-delayed process of healing with Asian neighbors that Japan conquered and destroyed in the 1930s and '40s."

Broadway, Virginia -- In our nation's capital, it has become more difficult to get from Capitol Hill to Georgetown. The reason, of course, is the need to take a detour around that anachronism on Pennsylvania Avenue.Why do I call the president's lovely mansion an anachronism? Is it necessarily anachronistic to have a stately country home sitting in the middle of a bustling modern city? That kind of anachronism we call ''charm.''What doesn't fit between this place and our times is the growing difficulty of keeping its occupant -- our head of state -- from being murdered.

THE HOLOCAUST Museum in Washington is dedicated to the remembrance of that infamous period of human history when Adolph Hitler and the Nazis perpetrated unspeakable horrors, cruelties and injustices primarily on their Jewish brethren. It is a graphic representation of the worst things that presumably civilized people can do. It contains, among many other items, an actual box car that was used to transport prisoners to the death camps and part of a barracks that housed them before they were herded to their deaths.

Over time, he and his brother,Sole survivors of unspeakable trauma,Replaced closeness, support, laughterWith anger, envy, bitterness.Unforgotten, unforgiven sibling sinsKept them distant, aloneUntil the elder died.His grown sons witnessed as childrenThis relentless brotherly erosion, andNow appear incapable of haltingA pride-driven repetition.

When losing our virginity, said Queen Victoria to her daughter, we must close our eyes and think of England.Attaching a little more lyricism to the act, the great romantics, from Cervantes to Byron, saw virgins as roses and their deflowering a poem to passions that would saddle lions.Karen Bouris' first time was somewhere in between: "Although I knew what I was doing, it was kind of a just-get-it-over-with experience. I was uninformed about my body. There was alcohol involved. It was significant in that it was the start of my growth as a woman and my self-imagery.

Jung Chang sees herself as the fabled child who voices the unspeakable truth that the emperor has no clothes.Ms. Chang, who left China in 1978 and now lives in London,believes that was one effect of her first book. And she says she'll play that role again with her next work.Her first book -- the widely acclaimed "Wild Swans," published in 1991 and recently released in paperback -- introduced many Western readers to the horrific details of China's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by matter-of-factly recounting her own family's sad history.

It's the unspeakable dog problem, if the calls I get are any indication."My dog eats his own . . . er . . . I mean, I need to know how to keep him from . . . um . . . you know what I mean? It's disgusting!"Dog experts such as trainers, behaviorists and veterinarians don't seem able to speak plainly about this either. They call it "coprophagia."No matter what it's called, the experts agree stool-eating is a common complaint. But it's more than an aesthetic problem: It's a perfect way to transmit parasites and disease.