The Lexicographer's Rules

"What's the big deal about watching some yutz Latin-dance with a fake life-size doll in the Times Square subway station! It's just doll! Jeez, get out of the way!"

—MrBarrett. Damien Barrett is a computer technology expert from Michigan now living in New York.

"It would have been great publicity. We have 2-foot-long Coney dogs for three bucks and a shrimp dinner for $5.69. He could eat like a king for 20 bucks if he ordered from here."

—New York Daily News. Speculation on the last meal for Timothy McVeigh. Dog 'N Suds would like to be chosen, but have not been called.'

"I never realized how much fear, how much suspicion my country still evokes, until I came to America five years ago. Fifty years after a decade of darkness is not a long time. I knew that. And yet it often left me confounded to read how my country was perceived. I started clipping stories from the papers. I have a thick folder labeled 'German' now. There is not a single article about my country in it that does not include the words 'Nazis,' 'past,' 'guilt,' 'uneasy,' 'anti-Semitic,' 'troubling,' 'disturbed,' or 'alarm.' Most of the stories 'evoke the past' or 'raise troubling questions' about my country."

—Christian Science Monitor. Mario Kaiser is a German who contemplates what Helmut Kohl called "the mercy of being born late."'

"Halle Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie, and she does it in a scene so gratuitous and well-lighted, she might be posing for Playboy. Because of that, and the fact that Berry urged Saturday's MTV Movie Awards audience to buy a ticket and check 'em out, I feel duty-bound to review them. Nice set."

—New York Daily News. The movie Swordfish is a stinker, writes Jack Matthews.'

"The king's son, Crown Prince Dipendra, was tending bar. He mixed one of his cousins a drink, and the assembled relatives chatted as they waited for dinner. At about 9 p.m., Dipendra slipped out of the gathering. A short while later, he reappeared, wearing an army uniform, his cap pulled low over his face, an Uzi submachine gun and an M-16 assault rifle in his hands."

—International Herald Tribune. From a narrative account of what is known so far about the mass regicide in Nepal.