Linguistic infidels hurl verbal nerf balls.

A GROWING DISAGREEMENT -- good-natured, but nonetheless important, I think -- exists between editors who do or don't publish letters to the editor submitted by telephone.

Count me among the don'ts.

I have nothing against the telephone. My late mother was a long-distance operator in the 1940s and '50s; Mr. Bell's invention helped more than a little in putting food on our table in my early years. I spend a sizable portion of every working day on the phone. The Masthead editor reminded me (gently) of an approaching deadline for this article by phone, yet I still like the darn things.

Still, I know what the electronic age -- television, certainly, but we must include the radio, telephone, and maybe even CB radios -- has done to our collective ability to communicate. We have become a nation whose daily exchanges of information are laced with fragmented thoughts, punctuated by the ignominy of call waiting, and truncated by the inability to follow a train of thought longer than Jay Leno's monologue.

In great part, this is because we don't write -- not as we did a generation ago, anyway. And I suggest that people who are in the business of writing and editing and peddling the result and allowing ourselves to think that it all might be in some way important would be wise to promote writing and the love of it instead of giving people another cheap out.

It is a rare person who speaks extemporaneously as well as she or he writes, if she puts her mind to it. These are different, if related, skills. Committing a message effectively to paper (or at least to bits and bytes) moves us to focus on detail. There is a need, among good writers, to strike the florid phrase, to unscramble the mixed metaphor, to make sure the argument stands up to examination. Will every letter writer do all this? Let's not kid ourselves. But the less we encourage people to do it, the less it is going to happen.

Sure, there are arguments for phoned-in "letters." (I won't dignify the telephonic variety by taking off the quotation marks.) These urgings, in my judgment, are all flawed, though. Let's look at what seem to be the three main ones:

* Letters are too long. This is a way to get shorter ones. Yes, in many cases they are too long, especially for modern sensibilities. Writing short is work; what was it the philosopher Blaise Pascal said about how his letter would have been shorter if he'd had more time? But it helps if we publish length guidelines for letters. Many correspondents at least try to come in under the nominal limit, even if they don't succeed. And if all else fails, shorten the wretched thing yourself as long you don't do violence to the writer's intent. It is a common practice to edit for conciseness, but who ever heard of lengthening a (telephoned) message that was too short and lightweight to convey the point?

* What about timeliness? Readers expect a quicker turnaround on what they read these days, and this is one way to get it. That's right, but reader/writers are figuring that out on their own. What else accounts for the growing popularity of faxed letters? Our readers began writing to us that way before we ever even published a fax number. Too, at least in smaller communities, there's always the walked-in letter, brought by the person who created it. And let's not kid around: For many of us who handle letters, there is just as much delay created in our own shop -- disorganization, overwork, and miscommunication take their toll -- as there is in the postal system.

* Letters are readers' way of feeling connected, forming a bond with the paper. Open the phone lines and you'll have more to print. Undoubtedly true. Also, if you gather nuts in the autumn you'll boost the count by picking up the ones with worm holes and those half-gnawed by squirrels, if quantity is the only thing that matters.

Beyond the grumpy points above, there is one for which I invite an answer if anyone can provide it: What do you do about verification? If you don't have some system, however imperfect, for checking authorship, you have either been conned or are waiting to be. The results sometimes get chuckled at, but they are occasionally libelous, invariably embarrassing, and never fun to explain. How do you verify a phone call? If Lily Tomlin's old Ernestine routine ("Is this the person to whom I am speaking?") doesn't come to mind, you at least get the point. I hope.

Maybe I'm too, er, hung up on the terminology. I still don't like the idea of phoned-in missives, but possibly I'd dislike it less if they were published as a separate category, labeled for what they are, and not sprinkled in among the honest work of those who sat down to a blank piece of paper and a thought. For me, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh, and a letter is still a letter.

The sun will still rise if every newspaper in the world starts sprinkling its letters column with these verbal Nerf Balls. But I don't think I'm making too much of this. Any time we miss the opportunity to exercise what little custodianship we have over writing and rational thought, the linguistic infidels inch that much closer.

Or so it seems to me, and enough said. I've probably blathered on too long.

This would have been shorter if I'd had more time.

NCEW member Charles Reinken is editorial page editor of the Fayetteville Observer-Times in North Carolina.