The Manhattan Mercury from Manhattan, Kansas • 29

BOOKS Sunday, August 3t 1997 D3 Hie Manhattan Mercury Library Corner Yes, we will have fall story Cave quid dicis! James J. Kilpatrick Jerri Garretson ago, the editors gave us "data isn't reliable" on page 43 and are excluded" on page 57. The Washington Post and National Review magazine regularly get it right: datum, singular; data, plural. The editors of Webster's 10th Collegiate, having one of their permissive fits, say that both singular and plural constructions are standard, but never mind Webster's on this one. If you intend to adorn your writing with a Latin word or phrase, look it up! A contributor to The Seattle Times began her article, "Cognito ergo sum," and fell flat on her face.

Descarte's famous postulate was "Cogito ergo sum," I think, therefore I am. An AP correspondent provided a story several years ago on training programs in the United States for foreign pilots: "Almost all these programs use the 'ab anitio' approach, Latin for 'from the Nice try. It's ab initio. It's also "ad nauseam," not "ad nauseum." Women graduates are alumnae, not alumni. The Latin phrase for "buyer beware" is "caveat not "caveat temptor." Today's award for the most unfortunate foul-up goes to the author of a handbook on wildlife laws in Oregon.

Such laws must be regarded as part "of the field of 'environmental law' purr se." Purr se? You don't say! Cave quid dicis, and all that there. media IS not to blame for Rep. Bud Shuster's problems with the highway trust fund. The Associated Press reported from Florida that when 0 J. Simpson played a round "of golf, "the media WAS kept away." In the same inexplicable fashion, some educators trip over educational terms.

Five years ago the graduate school of Georgia Southern University advised its candidates on procedures for receiving a degree "in abstentia." (It's absentia.) The former president of the Clark County School Board in Nevada remarked last year that student testing could be abandoned "if there isn't any standard curricula." (He wanted curriculum.) My brethren seem sadly uncertain about "data." Even Homer nods. George F. Will, an accomplished writer, has been known to say that "there IS data showing that education in prison correlates with reduced recidivism." In USA Today one finds "other data comes." In Charleston, S.C., a streamer headline tells us that "Sales data leaves market wary." Some writers obviously are confused. An AP dispatch from San Francisco in January said "data dictates" (wrong) and "if the data are accurate" (right). In the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch a year ago, a paragraph began: "Data are updated daily and is distributed In the same issue of Newsweek three years that the Chevrolet Blazer serves both the sport-utility enthusiast "and the bonified trucker." In Corning, N.Y., a furniture dealer advertised a "bonified value." In Winston-Salem, a Chevrolet dealer offered "the best bonified offer in North Carolina in 1997." What's so tough about "bona It too is in the dictionary.

It means "in good faith, without fraud or deceit sincere." If a buyer puts down a deposit on a house, he demonstrates his bona fides. Webster's says you may pronounce it to rhyme with "Mona rides," no matter how many Latin teachers you may send screaming from thte room. What truly baffles me is why so many people in the media foul up on "media." For crying out loud, "media" is a PLURAL noun! Yet the most respected publications can't get it straight. Here is The New York Times reporting that in Iraq "the government-controlled media WAS lavishing praise on President Hussein." The Wall Street Journal asserted in 1995 that the A few weeks ago in this space, faithful readers heard my semiannual howl about the misuse of French words and phrases. Today's howl has to do with the misuse of Latin words and phrases.

The message is, Cave quid dicis! Beware what you say. An item in a suburban Chicago paper six weeks ago ignited my stubby fuse. I will give it to you in its remarkable entirety: "Randy and Sherry Peppers would like to congratulate their son, Rocky R. Peppers, on his college graduation from Southern Illinois University in Car-bondale. Rocky graduated with top honors Suma Cum Loude." The best that can be said of that blundering paragraph is that at least the writer spelled "cum" correctly Why don't writers look things up? If the reporter had taken 10 seconds to l0ok into any handy dictionary he (or she) would have found "Summa cum laude" just waiting to be put to use.

Aaargh! In a special section devoted to automobiles, readers of The Cincinnati Enquirer learned Things to do mfi on my return ct Leonard Bishop XIV) that opened with a public park in Japan where hundreds of people were, in unison, doing their morning tai chi ritual. They were old wispy, wobbly and graceful. But they all looked swan-like to me. I like the idea of doing a ritual exercise that has a tradition and language to it, and doesn't need shrill rock music to have you keep the beat while going through exertions that would cause a sturdy gorilla a heart attack. I once bought a step-up-and-step-down platform and a Jane Fonda aerobic tape (all at a garage sale) and tried to do the movie-star workout.

Before a minute passed I had fallen twice, stubbed my toes three times, poked myself in the eye and developed sudden bowel cramps. I'm not anyone who has a sense of rhythm, and I won't wear my bearing aid while working out because I sweat, and dampness can injure the delicate mechanism. So what I hear in my right ear takes time to get to my left side. Then my left side is out of beat with my right side and one foot kicks the other foot while my right hand whacks my left thigh and my right thigh knots up as I kick too high, thinking I have to hit my chin and not my chest. The sweat causes my scalp to itch and I wiggle and squirm to not scratch my head, throwing my hips out of kilter which causes my ankles to twist and I begin stumbling forward, almost hitting the wall.

I would not quit. I was determined to become healthy, and slim down so I could wear the pants I have saved from when I was 30 years old. Then I began slipping in my perspiration. Beads of sweat burned my eyes and blurred my vision so I time! sent programs there this fall. A weekly half-hour drop-in storytime for all ages will be presented on Tuesdays at 2:30 p.m.

from Sept. 2 through Dec. 9. There is no registration required. Evening family storytimes at the library will be offered on Aug.

5 and Sept. 2 (the first Tuesday of each month) at 7:00 p.m. We do ask that parents remain on the premises for storytimes, or join in the fun themselves. Our two programs for elementary school age children will be offered at the Douglass Community Center Annex. Please note the enrollment information with each program.

You may sign up at Manhattan Public Library beginning Wednesday, Sept. 3. Storycrafters is a program for children ages 6-12 who like tolisten to, tell, write, act out and illustrate stories. It will be offered for six weeks from Sept. 9 to Oct.

14 at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesdays. It lasts about an hour. This program is limited and does require enrollment. Storytelling and More is for children ages 8-12 and involves stories, storytelling and creative dramatics.

Enrollment is requested, but some drop-in guests may be accommodated. It meets on the first Thursday of each month from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. A newsletter with all of this program information in an easier-to-use format is available in the Children's Department and at the Douglass Community Center Annex. If you have questions concerning any of these programs, please call the Children's Department at 776-4741, ext. 125.

We hope to be able to continue programs at the library itself later in the fall when our new parking lot is completed, and we look forward to planning programs in our new department when construction and "moving in" is completed. beast lives! "The Relic's" "Museum Beast." That means NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta and spunky anthropologist Margo Green are back: D'Agosta because two headless bodies are found in a New York City sewer, and Green when one of the bodies turns out to be a semi-mutated former colleague. That also means Pendergast is back, cool as ever whether taking on the police chief or exploring the miles of tunnels under Central Park. Soon, all three, plus tabloid journalist Bill Smithback, are trying to stop an insidious plan that would dump the Mbwun drug into Hudson Bay. If "The Relic" was "Alien," this is with more engaging heroes but less bloody horror.

Even though the first book fits alongside Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, "Reliquary" is more of a psychological thriller. There is violence, but it's not very graphic. Fans of those serial-killer-on-the-loose cop novels will love it. "Reliquary" is also a fast read.

Give it just a few hours while basking on a beach, and it's finished within a weekend. It's also good for those dead hours aloft while flying to vacation spots. There's not even the usual hint of a sequel: All loose ends are nicely tied up. Let's hope Hollywood wises up and puts Special Agent Pendergast in the inevitable movie version. Watty Lamb's warriors of love (3) Continued from Page D2 teacher of writing, Lamb satisfies his readers need for a satisfying ending as the story continues to evolve, yet providing the contentment of closure.

Cannon Eichman lives in Manhattan. Miss your paper? Call your carrier or the Circulation Department at The Manhattan Mercury at 776-8808 before 7 p.m. weekdays or 10 a.m. "I'm leaving on my annual trip to San Francisco to do some visiting and teaching, and this year I am actually too busy to make the trip. Thus, because I believe I am not remembering as efficiently as I should (although I api not getting forgetful since I have no cause for remembering what I have not yet done) I am developing a list of all I must do oq my return.

First, I must figure out how to use the lap-top computer I bought for $10 at a garage sale. (Someone suggested that I try plugging it into an electric socket.) It is about 12 years old and has all the parts, including an instruction book. It is bigger and linger than my lap. It comes with a thick canvas carrying case I have not yet learned how to remove without ripping out the bottom of the machine. It weighs about 30 pounds and emits a foul odor.

It was stored in a barn among field rats with urinary ailments. It is not that I need a computer fot my work, since I do all my writing by hand. I actually want to use it'for the airplane trips I take. To get back at those superficially c6nsiderate stewardesses who always stare at me and quickly take my elbow and coo, "Can I help you with your seat, Sir?" I will tell them, "Yes. Would you put my lap top computer into the overhead storage place?" and Our summer reading programs continued full speed ahead even though we had to curtail our storytimes due to the construction at the library.

We "lost" our auditorium at the end of June, but the 780 kids signed up for Read-On-Your-Own and the 100 families participating in Family Reading continued to read voraciously and keep our Children's Department happily busy. The reading programs were sponsored by McDonald's of Manhattan and culminated in a party on July 25 with a performance by lpagician Curtis Alan Hed at the City Auditorium. All summer we've fielded questions about our fall programs, wondering what we would be able to offer during the construction period. Our staff loves doing programs for kids and we've found a way to continue them this fall, though the format will be new and different. Here at the library, we will offer preschool story-times for five weeks, beginning the same week school starts this year.

This is three weeks earlier than usual, but allows us to present five weeks before construction needs require a break. We will hold storytimes in the Children's Department, and this time, we won't have registration. "Drop-in" storytimes will be held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as in the past, at about the same times. Some will be planned for particular age groups, though -others may attend. Some will be planned for a wider range of ages.

Two-year-old storytimes will continue to be "laptime" programs with parent and child attending together. In an effort to expand what we can offer and give us a chance to try some outreach programming we have wanted to do for a long time, we have arranged with Douglass Community Center Annex to pre The museum Andy Grieser Fort Worth Star-Telegram RELIQUARY. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. St. Martin's PressForge.

$24.95 Checkunderyour beach blanket before opening this Beach Read. "Reliquary" is a fast-paced horrorthriller with an army of mutant mole people. "Reliquary" is the sequel to "The Relic," an engaging horror story made into a movie lastyear. "The Relic" worked mostly because of Pendergast, a Southern gentleman FBI agent who almost tracked down a bloodthirsty mutant in New York's Museum of Natural History. Not that it scared him Pendergast has seen more weird stuff than "The X-Files'" Mulder and Scully put together.

Sadly, he was cut out of the film version, which also moved the action to Chicago. But don't lump co-authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child with Michael Crichton, who favored the movie plot of "Jurassic Park" over his own work when writing the sequel. Preston and Child set "Reliquary" right back down in New York. As prophesied by the epilogue of the first book, a power-mad scientist is determined to synthesize the drug that turned anAmazonexplorerintoMbwun, Escobar into surrender. Father Garcia Herreros, 82, a priest for 52 years and beloved television personality for his "God's Minute," is seen as a saint by some, as half-mad by others.

Constantly having trouble with his contact lens, the white-haired father leaves Vil-lamizar for a key meeting with Escobar. "Don't worry about me," he shouts. "I control the waters." With that, Garcia Marquez writes, "A clap of thunder rolled across the vast countryside, and the skies opened in a biblical downpour." Occasionally, Garcia Marquez allows a touch of his celebrated magical realism. couldn't see the step-up-and-step-down platform. Then the garage sale tape reached a por-tionthathad been stretched and the music suddenly slowed.

I was thrown off my beat. But I was already gasping and dizzy so I just crumbled to the carpet and used the platform as a head rest and drifted into a deep sleep that was really a coma of exhaustion. When I awoke, I used the platform to build a shortlegged chair. So my physical salvation will be in learning the tai chi dance steps and arm gestures. If the instructor is patient and has, before, worked with arthritic and bursitis-bent old timers who will try to put the cost of the tai chi lessons on Medicare, I will be most grateful.

I will purchase a tent-sized white uniform and ask for a pink belt, to indicate that any martial arts practitioner evena4-year-old boy still wearing a soiled diaper, or a badly crippled dwarf in a wheelchair can beat the chicken-stuffing out of me. While I am in San Francisco, I will go to Golden Gate Park in the morning where, I believe, there are some tai chi aerobics conducted. I will wear a black ponytail toupee and a long fake hooked nose so no students will recognize me. I'll use that as my "breaking in experience." So when I return to Kansas I will lose my inherent timidity and really do what I am returning to do. Strip down to my bikini jog-ging-shorts, doused in sunburn preventative to keep from getting skin cancer, and stopping only for those sightseers who want to take pictures of me to demonstrate how kindly the Kansas climate is to their "becoming geriatric" citizens.

a framework of self-respect." It's parents who need to take that responsibility, she says, and that's why she's been delighted to find during her book tour that many parents are buying "Promiscuities" as a teaching tool and a dialogue opener with their daughters. But the real audience she wants to reach with the book are the girls in America's junior high schools and high schools, the ones who scan their library shelves in search of something to explain themselves. "I just want it to get to the girls," she says. mind of a captive held by young gangsters from the slums with no futures, no beliefs, no feeling of humanity. For the three woman crammed in a room with only one bed Maruja and Beatriz slept on the cold floor the pain was psychological as well as physical.

Fear of sexual( molestation mingled with the' prospect of execution at any moment. "News" tells of desperate hours, of crushed hopes of freedom, of coming to terms with sometimes brutal, sometimes more amiable guards. There are lighter moments, too, especially in Marquez's descriptions of the holy emissary who joins with Alberto in the last effort to ed? I Undertaking sexual understanding then control my laughter as she gets a young hernia. Also, I want to use it during the flight. Not to do any serious writing, because I believe that writing on a computer is death to writing quality.

But I want to appear like the business people who use their lap tops for momentous business purposes and look important. I have always envied the starch in their shirts and the clean fingers they use to tippy-tap their computers and develop weird schematics while their fake Rolex wristwatches glitter. They may not think much of the computer clunker I have to heft onto my lap. But once I start tippy-tapping and the heat in the machine increases and intensifies the rat-urine aroma issuing from its electronic entrails hey, I'll be getting some attention. Yes, sir.

When I return, I will also look in the Yellow Pages of the telephone book and learn if there is a studio (dojo) that will teach a senior citizen some of.the tai chi choreographies. A senior citizen who is overweight and as graceful as a gawky elephant with three legs and a stunted trunk. Who breathes hard after walking two short streets, and has to pinch himself all over, for half an hour, to help his blood circulation. But about a year ago I saw a head-kicker movie (Kickboxer innocence to popular culture and media before they even reach puberty. (Perhaps it is fitting that her husband is a speech-writer for the Clinton administration.) But Wolf says she is anything but conservative.

What she wants is to take back a chunk of the morality that she sees conservatives claiming for their own. "I don't want to sound like a reactionary," she said. "But the left kind of blew it. The right has conceived the whole language of right and wrong." In her ideal world, girls would The events of "News of a Kidnapping" are almost unthinkable at times. Marque describes a society in a state of almost total background.

Assassinations, bombings, abduc-tionshad become a way of life in Colombia well before the 1990 kidnappings. Terrorist assaults by M-19, a radical faction legalized by 1990, gave way to a war between the drug lords like Escobar and the police. The atrocities committed by the forces of the law had become so vicious that international organizations devoted to fighting human-rights violations backed Escobar's allegations against the gestapo forces that grabbed, 1) Continued from Page Al an. That's right, garbage woman. "I really just want to get on down the road," she says.

"In ech of these books, I'm finding aft obstacle in the road. It seems like so much activity we tall feminism is justclearingthe garbage out of the road so we can get on with our lives. I can't wait until that is no longer necessary." 'The book is laced with viewpoints that sound almost conservative: Teen-agers are having sex too early, getting preg-nknt too early, and losing their Magical realism lightens grim 'News of a Kidnapping' be taught to embrace petting as an alternative to having actual sex, at least until they're ready. They would be encouraged to celebrate their own desire instead of stifling it. And they wouldn't accept a society that allows teen-age boys to ridicule their sexuality.

"There no longer is an innocent state that kids grow up in," Wolf says. "If we're going to create this culture, help them survive this culture that puts words and images at them long before they are ready to deal with them, then responsibly, I think we have to give them guidance and tortured and executed boys from Medellin slums. Escobar, and the leaders of other cocaine cartels, such as the Cali organization, responded with their own mad-dogcoun-terattacks, putting bounties on the heads of police officers. Moving from the palace of the young President Cesar Gaviria forced to deal with the kidnapping of Marina Montoya three weeks after taking office to the damp, freezing hideouts where Maruja, Beatriz and Marina all lived in a tiny room, Garcia Marquez sets out a kaleidoscopic view of Colombia with a novelist's feeling for telling detail. Through Maruja, he tnters the (2) Continued from Page Al America, politics and the media are incestuously related.

After he ordeal, for example, Maruja was named education minister. Diana, whose father worked with Santos' father to try to secure the hostages' release, was not so fortunate as Maruja. Killed by a stray shot during a bungled rescue attempt, a move opposed by the families, the courageous Diana was one of two fatalities among the hostages.The other was Manna, once a great beauty, now an aging but vain restaurateur, whose death was no accident butanexecution..