A game/contest on National Public Radio, which I find addictive, asks participants to guess the title of a book, movie, poem, etc. on the basis of various verbal clues. The catch is that one letter in one word in the answer will have been changed.For example, the person who is “it” gets told that this movie concerns Russell Crowe, as Prof. John Forbes Nash, who is pondering the loveliness of a chocolate confection. How much time lapses before the guesser comes up with “A Beautiful Mint”?

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The world of deadline journalism presents challenges. On countless occasions, I’ve explained to a critical reader — or an even more critical reading public — that we at the Optic didn’t make the errors; rather, the typos resulted from something else.Like the kid who swears, “Gee, Mom, I was just playing, and all of a sudden, the vase fell all by itself — honest,” we’d like to hear from readers who say, “Out of the 20,000 words you printed today, 19,998 were correct.” But we seldom hear about correct spelling or punctuation.

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Last week’s column sent a couple of acquaintances to the dictionary to keep me honest; I’d used the word “sublime” as a verb, in the context of causing a solid to convert to a vapor, and back again, with the application of heat.

Granted, to sublime something is not an expression one hears every day, except in laboratories. Nevertheless, these friends, who at first challenged my use of the word, managed to work it into a later conversation. But their tone indicated disdain, as if to say, “Yeah, sure, you think you’ve coined a word and expect us to fall for it,” rather than “Gee, I never thought of that.”

One of them then brought up her pet peeve, namely gluing “-ize” to words that shouldn’t have such attachments. For example, it’s acceptable, and even efficient, to choose “hospitalize” in place of “admit to the hospital,” or “politicize” in place of “inject politics into.” These terms are fine, and we have many of them. But why utilize “utilize” when we should use “use”?

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A simple question from my daughter-in-law Heather caused a bit of confusion, and when I’m confused, I dream up ideas for a column.

Here’s what happened: Heather, my son Benji and I went to the Las Vegas Recreation Center for a workout. I pulled out three water bottles from the trunk, one for each. After our workout, Heather asked, as I stood perspiring on the scale, “How many ounces did you lose?� It occurred to me the question was perfectly ambiguous, even triguous. Did she mean how many ounces of water did I sweat, or how many ounces of weight did I shed, or even how many ounces of bottled water did I spill? In my case, finding those ounces occurs easier than losing them.

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Why are siblings so mean? Why such perfectionists? Why can’t my slightly older sister allow me to wallow in variations of my own distortions?

Let me explain:

Last week my column covered the pluralizing of surnames, pointing out that many people believe all they need to do is insert an apostrophe before an “s” and the job is done. Accordingly, it’s proper to report that the Trujillos (no apostrophe) took a day trip last week to Mountainair and Gran Quivira Monument.
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    Remember the Serf Theater sign, the one abandoned several years ago, with “In Her Shoes” left there, giving the impression it was one of history’s longest-running movies?
    It’s gone through several transformations, some rather clever, such as “Heros Shine” and “Oh He’s Risen.” Remember the rules: Thou who rearrangeth the sign shalt use all of the letters. Only recently, somebody took the trouble to anagrammize the west side of the sign.�
The change now reads, “3 Roses for Her. Fini.” Apparently the sign also contained the date, “31 Fri.,” which accounts for the extra letters.
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A one-line item in last week’s Work of Art mentioned my plan to return to teaching in the fall. If students sign up in sufficient numbers, if we have clement weather and a stiff tail wind, I’ll be co- teaching a journalism course at Highlands to help revive the moribund college newspaper, La Mecha.

Tom McDonald, Optic publisher, will be the co-teacher and doesn’t yet know that he’ll have almost the “lion’s share” of the duties. (Remember, lions don’t share, so technically McDonald would be doing all of the work. So that’s why he’ll have almost the lion’s share.)

Rachael Ball, virtually a one-person newspaper crew, did an admirable job of putting out La Mecha this school year, under some taxing conditions. As editor, she worked hard but often lacked reliable help. McDonald and I hope to restore La Mecha, which hit the skids around the year 2000, when the journalism program got deep-sixed after my retirement.
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Winner of the 2008 Associated Press Managing Editors competition

Never never never did I have the parent of a student hassle me about a grade. That was when I taught at the college level.

Always always always was I confronted by parents who thought I’d been unfair to their child. That was at the high school level.

My sister-in-law, Donna, an elementary school teacher, envied my autonomy and my ability to do my job at Highlands without needing permission slips from parents, without notifying parents that their child had missed class, or spending half my teaching day on playground or cafeteria duty.

But what Donna warned me about, more than 20 years ago, ruined my day. “One of my former students is at Highlands now and signed up for your class,” Donna said. “And you can expect for her mom to be dropping by your office regularly.”

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Recent columns appear to have had sticking power, as I still get feedback about items on home remedies, columns about the pronunciation of some Spanish names and of the ways we play with words.

At an Associated Press awards banquet last week, I met Phaedra Haywood, a Santa Fe New Mexican staffer who’d just taken a first place in feature writing for a series of articles on volunteers for a fashion makeover. Part of her beat is the village of Pecos, and she mentioned that some of the remedios — Aceite Mexicano, volcanic oil and castor oil — I’d listed in a previous column were familiar to residents of that community.

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An aphorism that for me rings truest is “The shortest line is the slowest.” I can’t think of many things in life more profound.

As one who hates keeping people waiting in line, whether in a bank, supermarket, big box or anywhere else, I sympathized with a gentleman in front of me at Wal-Mart last week who used the wrong card to charge his goods.

As soon as he realized his mistake, I sensed we were going to be there for extra innings. Whether the customer was close to being over the limit on the card, or he simply preferred to use another, we never found out. By that time, a couple of customers behind me started getting impatient. The checker, not knowing how to cancel the transaction, needed assistance from customer service and went into rush mode, which means about one step every 12 seconds.

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