Random House Not Only Pushes the Envelope, but Marks It Express Mail.

When did you last write a tatpurusha? Probably more recently than you think. A tatpurusha is a compound of two words in which the first is an attributive noun and the second, a substantive: Examples include bookcase, aircraft, flowerpot, guidebook.

And before ruminating on summer reading let us warm up with a quartet of additional nouns peculiar to our peculiar business. Is palimpsest a no-brainer for you? If not, here's the word from the brainers at American Heritage Dict. III: "1. a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. 2. An object, a place, or an area that reflects its history...."

Thumb back about 1,000 pages and you'll discover another weird word with possibly no synonym -- boustrophedon: "An ancient method of writing in which the lines are inscribed alternately from right to left and from left to right." (From the Greek for turning like oxen in plowing).

Let's get out of this with opisthograph, which refers to a manuscript or book having writing on both sides of the leaves. That said, I just know you'll handle anopisthograph flawlessly.

* If there's yet an empty afternoon or two in your summer reading program, for a mere 14-dollar bill you can fill one with Christine Ammer's Cool Cats, Top Dogs, and Other Beastly Expressions, a mightily engaging and writer-useful congeries of essays from Boston's Houghton Mifflin Co. The author of 20 popular reference works, including The American Heritage(r) Dictionary of Idioms, Ammer here presents backgrounders on more than a thousand bestial phrases. One of her top grossers (stay with me, here...) returns to the Middle Ages, when throat infections were sometimes treated by putting a live frog headfirst into the patient's mouth; by inhaling, the frog was believed to draw out the patient's infection into its own body. The treatment is now obsolete, but its memory survives in our term a frog in one's throat to i.d. hoarseness.

Ammer takes us from scapegoat to skunk works to snake pit to snake-check with a stalking horse to peruse along the trail. Line art, 266 pages.

* Two new lexical treats are out this summer: one, "The 1st Dictionary with Attitude," is The Merriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary ("with Comics!"); two, "In a first...editors name the single most offensive word in the English language," is the 1999 Random House Webster's College Dictionary.

The M-W title (US$12.95, paper, 800 pp.) is based on The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Home and Office Edition; offers 70,000+ definitions; and is pushed as "perfect for all ages and levels of language skill, including ESL." With a didactic Garfield strip on every spread, and a tri-page list of Super Cat's daffy definitions as a closer, it's a relaxing beach-read for the professional word-nerd and a splendid gift from one such. Students will value its combining practical language information with humor. I especially like the roster of foreign words/phrases often seen in English texts but not yet anointed by all lexical hunter-gatherers: These include the Chinook-jargon motto of Washington, al-ki, for by and by, and the spooky Latin panem et circenses, for bread and circuses, i.e., provision of the means of life and recreation by government to appease discontent. One regrettable omission: ailurophile, for cat lover.

The R-H title (US$24.95, hardback, 1572 pp.) heralds a major commitment to users: annual updating. And in addition to presenting "more new words than any other dictionary," RHWC has rewritten its definitions of offensive terms and labeled them more strongly. For example, the editors present the "most offensive word in the English language," nigger, with a 110-word usage warning that includes the adjectives contemptuous, hostile, extremely disparaging, and offensive.

These tempting benefits to writerly types remind us that the day of "the dictionary" is long gone...that online lexicons and a roundhouse full of search engines oblige us to work only with the freshest lexical data. Consider the World Almanac and other perennial annuals.

It is good to see RanHouse not only pushing the envelope, but marking it Express Mail.

Among the new words posted are: Roth IRA, Steadicam, road rage, family values, telomerase, Java, DVD, and face time. That last phrase slips in between facetiae, for "amusing or witty remarks or writing," and facetious, for "not meant to be taken seriously." Its meanings: 1) a brief tv appearance; 2) a brief meeting, esp. with a VIP; 3) a vis-a-vis with a person one knows only from phone or e-mail correspondence. A useful resource 24-7 (see p. 1409).

* How many times have you been a second too late with a fine repartee, or with a golden line formed a day or a week after the moment had passed? I was just thinking back to Louis Armstrong's death in 1971 (that long ago!); I made mention in a column at the time, but lacked the wit to summon up the Hiltonesque headline, "Goodbye, Mr. Chops."

Alden Wood, APR, lecturer on editorial procedures at Simmons College, Boston, Mass., writes and lectures on language usage. He is a retired insurance industry vice president of advertising and public relations.