Words

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.

What's in a simple word? Only simple misunderstanding, stupidity, insensitivity or simple ruin.David Howard, an aide to Washington Mayor Anthony Williams, resigned this week after using the word "niggardly" to mean what it means: stingy, miserly. Some people were offended, as the word sounds very similar to a racial slur.Williams accepted the resignation, saying his aide showed poor judgment; an investigation is under way. Howard said he used the word to describe a fund he administers."Niggardly" generally tends to be avoided in speech and in writing.

The cafeteria of Our Lady of Victory School in Arbutus was home to a different kind of bingo during a recent visit. Children gathered around Scrabble boards instead of cards and ink blotters. Teacher Sharon Mosher spoke into a wireless microphone when they spelled words such as goblets or tsunami. And teams that used seven letters in one turn - known as a "bingo" - earned a 50-point bonus. "Our first bingo of the day is reaping," she proclaimed. "You reap what you sow." For about six years, Mosher has sown a healthy crop of fans of the game.

MOSCOW -- They make some Russians angry. They leave others confused. And they cause Americans to smile, or wonder why.They're the odd-sounding English names affixed to streetside kiosks all over town."

For being "just words," they're sure stirring up some controversy. Critics of Sen. Barack Obama are pointing to the similarity between one of the Democratic presidential hopeful's signature speeches and an address that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick gave in 2006. Although Patrick, who is close with Obama and shares his heavyweight political adviser, says he gave his friend permission to borrow his lines, that isn't stopping accusations of plagiarism. Last weekend in Wisconsin, responding to statements from rival Sen. Hillary Clinton that she offers solutions while Obama merely "makes speeches," Obama told a stirred-up crowd, "Don't tell me words don't matter."

BEEN OUT TO THE STICKS LATELY?Or do they call it "the boondocks" where you come from? Or "cabbage patch"? "cheesequake"? "The first rusty spike to the left"?And what about the part of town where the well-off folks live? "Nob Hill"? "Snob Hill"? "Debtors' Row"?Do you call your morning doughnut a "sinker"? A "dunker"? A "soaker"? A "clinker"? Some people do.If you want your tea without milk or lemon, do you take it "straight"? Or "plain"? "black"? Or "barefoot"? In Georgia, you might ask for it "raw."

They still have to stand on their tiptoes to peer through the windows in the door to Room 8, and some still aren't strong enough to turn the doorknob without using both hands. But inside their first-grade classroom at Reisterstown's Cedarmere Elementary School, much has changed.No longer is there confusion between p's and q's, between b's and d's. The letters scattered across walls and blackboards have meaning. Books are looked at for the words, not just the pictures.More than halfway through first grade, reading is no longer much of a guessing game in Room 8. It's an accomplishment for almost all of the 22 first-graders -- and a continuing challenge.

A basketball scholarship enables Peggy Dana, back in 1971, to escape the Pittsburgh slums. But late registration costs her a dorm room; instead, the University of Maryland (College Park) refers her to a nearby private home. Martin and Doris Ellen, middle-aged and childless, welcome a student boarder. Peggy, who is white, soon addresses them fondly as Mister and Missus; they are upper-middle black. In her novel, 22 Friar Street (Flower Valley Press, 240 pages, $14.95, softbound), Nan DeVincent-Hayes of Salisbury plaits a triple thread: race relations, four years of college life, the emotional growth of a tall, skinny, self-conscious girl still in her teens (she is the narrator)

NEWT GINGRICH, despite lying to peers, you've just been re-elected the first Republican House Speaker since Gatsby danced the Charleston. What can you say?"

WASHINGTON -- Seeing the floor littered with stompies, the drissy wowser told the janitor to stop kicksin' and clean up before the bagmen arrive for the toenadering.Huh?What sounds like gibberish is actually foreign English -- words used by folks in other countries who share the language with Americans, but with their own linguistic twists."Stompies" are cigarette butts in South Africa. New Zealanders use "drissy" as adjective meaning "frantic." A "wowser" is an Aussie with a puritanical disposition.