Words every word lover should know--and more.

Calling all word freaks: Courtesy of Bill Brooks, quondam Indianapolis News writer (mid- to late 20th century), we present what is suggested to be the all-time leader in the field of sentences displaying delayed/deferred syntactic gratification. Brooks clipped and shipped the lead from an Associated Press story dated 19 September 1990 that he'd kept in his favorite horrors folder. Here's the third graf, in full:

"She has steadfastly claimed that she does not know where her daughter, who disappeared after a dispute with her husband five years ago, is."

Freshen up your summer reading with a couple of new paperbacks from Houghton Mifflin. Newest in the publisher's 100 Words series is 100 Words Every Word Lover Should Know. The volume skips along from aesthetic to egregious to jeremiad to meretricious to Zeitgeist to zenith. Each entry is identified by part of speech, inflections, order of senses, examples of usage and etymologies.

For example: Humuhumunukunukuapuaa--pronounced just the way it looks--is the noun that identifies the state fish of Hawaii. Oxymoron means a rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in deafening silence. Most of us are already familiar with standards jumbo shrimp and military intelligence.

Also new in paperback, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages rerainds us of the urgency of Canadian author Mark Abley's mission: to preserve disappearing languages. Of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, only 600 may survive into the next century. Like animals at risk of extinction, languages can be endangered when there is no room for them to grow or expand. Abley notes this does not affect only the population that speaks the language. "The world risks losing another cultural viewpoint and the opportunity to discover more about one of its shrinking but integral societies," he writes.

Spoken Here reveals some of the particulars of threatened languages:

Mati Ke (northern Australia)--a marri: a kind of cockroach that lives in dead cycad fronds. Me marri: people whose totems are the cockroach and the cycad.

Lokele (eastern Congo)--liala: a garbage dump. LiAla: a fiancee. (The "a" sound is spoken with a rising pitch; otherwise, it's identical to liala.)

Yiddish (many places where European Jews have settled)--kesheneganev: pickpocket (combining the Polish word for pocket with the Hebrew word for thief).

Welsh (Wales)--blwyddyn: year; blynyddoedd: years.

Based on the preceding, this column hereby proclaims there is no such course as Welsh 101.

A real estate ad in a major Boston daily set what is for me a new level of pretentiousness. The advertiser offered not only "wooded rolling land" with "gravel beaches" and "a large tidal cove," but also "a sizable yurt and a dock with float."

Before I opened my lexicon, all I could infer for yurt was some obscure Middle Eastern omelet. Not. Shoulda looked right there on page 1,455 of my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th):

"yurt n (1876): a circular domed tent of skins or felt stretched over a collapsible lattice framework and used by pastoral peoples of inner Asia." There's even a picture. I wonder what the dude paid for his cool felt house and what his state of mind was after his first proper nor'easter.

From a film review in another Boston-area daily newspaper: "[a man was put in a straitjacket] and left in a body drawer in a basement morgue for long and tortuous periods of time...."

Time to flip back to the lexicon just mentioned: "tortuous: marked by repeated twists, bends, or turns: WINDING...." Next see "torturous: causing torture; very unpleasant or painful...." Now which adjective did our trained professional writer really want to grab?

A letter to the editor in a Simmons College newspaper: "(This is to comment on the article ... visa-vi the class talk.)" Spelling by ear will nail you every time. See page 1,398 in the above-mentioned dictionary: "vis-a-vis prep: in relation to...."

Visa-vi--no entry.

Alden Wood, professor emeritus at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, writes and lectures on language usage. He is a retired insurance industry vice president of advertising and public relations. His e-mail address is [e-mail].