You know your militate v. mitigate, but are you jiggy with dead-cat bounce and chin music?

And the beet--as in between--goes on, as you will surely detect in this excerpt from PRWEEK for 4 Aug., 2003. Columnist Lawrence Mitchell Garrison wrote:

"I found the star (Sean Connery) to be courteous and gentlemanly during our dealings, but all was not rosy between he and the director."

No doubt your writer's ear rang the alarm at that solecistic between he. As John B. Bremner growls in "Words on Words," "Prepositions take the objective case: between you and me, between her and him, between them and us." He dubs between you and I a barbarism.

He also points out that "'He smoked furiously between each act' doesn't make sense. A plural, or two singulars, should come after between. Make it 'between acts,' or 'between one act and the next.'"

* Watching the series "JAG" (for Judge Advocate General) on tv recently, I heard this startling utterance by a character/attorney: "The circumstances tend to mitigate against going to a court martial." Turning once again to Bremner's bible, the student learns:

"Militate/Mitigate--The words are sometimes confused. Militate means to have an effect or influence on, to operate as a force for or against, as in 'His parole record militated in his favor' or 'His lack of polish militated against his advancement.' Mitigate means to soften, to assuage, to make more endurable, as in 'Her reputation for compassion mitigated the vehemence of her criticism.'"

* An announcement headlined "Holy Spirit Prayer" appeared on an obituary page of The Boston Globe. The text commenced with "Oh, Holy Spirit, you who enlighten me...."

Dependable "Words Into Type"--see page 146--gives us a welcome hand regarding the vocative O: "The vocative O in English is always capped; but oh is capped only when it begins a sentence or stands alone.

"Thy ways, O Spirit, are unconfined.

"For if you should, oh! what would become of it? ..."

In this invocation the vocative O must replace the popular soundalike.

* Just 10 years ago, CommWorld published its review of the tenth edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate[R] Dictionary; now the eleventh is in the wordshops, at US$25.95, only a four-dollar bill more than the 1993 edition.

The new package comprises three lexical components: There is the 1,664-page thumb-notched print edition that offers approximately one million separate pieces of information; there is the CD-ROM that links easily onto the hard drive for real-time accessibility; and there is a one-year subscription to the new Collegiate web site. This last feature brings the reader not only the complete, searchable text of the hardcover lexicon but also of the Collegiate Thesaurus and the Encyclopedia.

The editors point to more than 100,000 changes. One such adds noun political correctness to adjective politically correct. The complete corpus presents 165,000 entries with 225,000 clear definitions; new words and meanings total 10,000; etymologies and usage examples come to 73,000.

What of the new words? Well, dead-cat bounce made it into the business and law section: "n [from the facetious notion that even a dead cat would bounce slightly if dropped from a sufficient height] (1985): a brief and insignificant recovery (as of stock prices) after a steep decline." Chin music means either idle talk or "a usu. high inside pitch in baseball intended to intimidate the batter." Trademark Botox is in: used for a preparation of botulinum toxin. And dead presidents joins dead air, dead letter, dead metaphor, and dead reckoning, the newbie standing for "U.S. money in the form of bills."

Bubkes? Not what you think. Means the least amount, can mean nothing.

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