Words

You can't blame Karen Fletcher for deciding not to fight. Had she lost, she faced the possibility of five years in prison. Under the plea agreement she accepted in early August, she got six months of house arrest, five years on probation and a $1,000 fine. But if the agreement allows Ms. Fletcher, of Donora, Pa., to avoid the more onerous punishment, it also allows us to avoid a violent collision between morality and the Constitution. Karen Fletcher is a pornographer. And not just any old pornographer: The 56-year-old woman specializes in the rape, torture and murder of children.

LOS ANGELES -- Bill Clinton got where he is by pretty much accepting the golden rules of American celebrity, beginning with ''There is no such thing as bad publicity,'' and ''As long as they spell your name right . . . ''So he got zinged a little the other night when a New York disc jockey named Don Imus, a man candidate Clinton had courted in the 1992 campaign, was invited to speak in the relatively polite society of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association....

Kathleen Farrell has left a mark - thousands of them, in fact - on beaches she has never set foot on. Farrell, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., wasn't at the beach, but vacationing in the mountains of North Carolina in 1996 when inspiration struck: a newfangled way to spread not just "The Word," but three of them. Farrell, a clinical psychologist, sliced up an old inner tube, cut the pieces into letters, glued them backward on the soles of an old pair of sandals and then walked from wet grass onto wooden deck, leaving a trail of words behind her. The word "Jesus" was left by the right foot; the words "Loves You" by the left.

New London, Connecticut -- President Bush's State of the Union address confirmed a trend evident in the last few decades. Public language is in big trouble.Presidents cannot speak like scrappy municipal pols. National resolve rises on the language of leadership -- on clear, inspired words.Where has the language gone that transformed the spirit? Do any of us remember public language that transcended troubling times and forged a vision that vaulted into being because people could see it, feel it and work for it?

It would not be entirely accurate to say I was first in line at the music store.I was not first in line, because, technically, there was no line.It was just me.I was there to purchase the new Beatles album, which was released yesterday. These were words -- new Beatles album -- I never expected to say again in that order. The last new Beatles album to hit the stores was "Let It Be" in 1970, and the boys had already broken up by then, meaning Linda McCartney would soon be allowed to play keyboard in public.

They say you can learn a lot about a culture by its language. If that's the case, Americans seem to have become obsessed with sex and health in the last 10 years.That's one of the findings lexicographer Anne Soukhanov and her team of 175 language specialists discovered researching new words for the American Heritage Dictionary Third Edition ($39.95). They studied words that came into common usage during the last 10 years.HIV. Fitness walking. Kiss and tell. Immunodeficiency. T-cells. Stress test.

It is amazing, given The Sun's presumption of children's indifference to the Pledge of Allegiance, how parents nonetheless care so much about it that an atheist parent sues to have "under God" taken out, the courts decide the case has merit, and our political leaders rise almost with one voice to defend these same words ("Part of the woodwork," editorial, June 28). Perhaps only The Sun's editors believe no one cares about the pledge because "the words don't mean as much" as they once did or that the ritual matters but the meaning of the words does not. And, of course, it is bad, in The Sun's view, for the courts to provide "fodder for right-wingers" by taking the case.

IN HIS inauguration speech yesterday, George W. Bush invoked the word freedom, and when he wasn't invoking freedom he went for its synonym, which is liberty. These are wonderful words. They remind all Americans of the things we treasure. They are part of our very DNA. All that divides us is the way we sometimes define the words, and the way we sometimes put them into action. On the day he commenced his second term as president, Bush's speechwriters defined them poetically. America is "standing watch on distant borders," Bush said.

Bitch is an appropriate word when referring to a female dog. Yet how many of us would use the term when chatting about a pet's gender with a stranger in the park? Few, I'd venture to say - because of our sensitivity to the word's negative connotations. Then there's the word love. Two strangers meet at a singles bar and one asks the other to return home with him to "make love." That's love as a euphemism for sex. How different the meaning is when a couple of a quarter-century's duration stay home on a Saturday night to talk, snuggle and make love.

I was the queen of homework Web sites during my children's school years. Before most families had mastered keyboards on their home computers, I found a place on the Internet that would translate my children's school papers into a foreign language. I thought I had seen it all until I saw this reference in one of my daughter's college papers: www.urbandictionary.com. It is the home of slang. Aaron Peckham, the California college computer whiz who launched Urban Dictionary, laughed out loud when I told him that at least one college kid was listing it in a bibliography.