The Lexicographer's Rules

"The process starts very early. The girl has to be completely dominated and utterly dependent so that she obeys her boss. The punishment for not obeying is extreme violenceÑfrom her boss, from her clients. You see, her clients are not young and tender lovers. They are men who are hungry for sex and whose behaviour is more animalistic than you can possibly imagine."

—Sydney Morning Herald. It is believed from 1 to 2 million women are dragged into prostitution world-wide each year, led and pushed by lies, coercion and abuse. Young girls, even just children, are involved, bought and sold like cattle (for as little as $150), treated like slaves, their plight ignored. '

"They put everything they had into the tent, and when they came back out of the tent the bear was right there at the campsite, just a few meters away, and that prompted them both to run off into the wooded area behind, and the bear took chase after Mr. Harry and the girl managed to survive."

—Globe and Mail. A highly rare bear attack in the Northwest Terroritories. "Through the wooded area it's kind of hard to judge the distance, but it was no more than 30 to 50 yards, maybe, from where they were camping if you drew a straight line into the woods. The bear managed to catch up to Mr. Harry and maul him and kill him. Now the girl did look back. She went up a little rise here and looked back and did see the bear on Mr. Harry, and he was screaming for her to go get help, which she did. She kept running and eventually got back to the highway area and some people there took her into town."'

"They're doing the usual potboilers, endless Carmens. Audiences are getting opera on the cheap."

—Globe and Mail. "Cut-rate" orchestras, dancers and musicians from the former Soviet nations are hiring themselves out for cheaper than local British peformers, and the unions aren't happy.'

"The man went on: 'I've been trying to find an answer to a question, and I haven't found it in any books. In World War II, when Hitler killed the Americans and the British and the French and the Jews, what race killed them?' It took me a half-second to untangle the question, but even before I did I got that jolt of neck-sweat that signals dangerous territory ahead. In America, when a person of one race says the word 'race' to a person of another race, you start phrasing your sentences very carefully."

—Washington Post. White man John F. Kelly recounts a bizarre encounter with a young black man on the DC metro who seemed hellbent on pinpointing the fact that it was whites who did all the killing on behalf of the Nazis during World War II, not blacks.'

"I had come back to Dondyushany armed to the teeth. I had two pistolsÑone Russian, one GermanÑa dagger, some 20 rounds of machine-gun ammunition and two hand-grenades. I couldn't recognise my village. I had difficulty finding our house, which seemed minute, like a toy. I was hailed by our neighbour, a girl called Klava Russu. She was so pleased to see me, but in all that time I had never given her a thought. I'd forgotten that she existed. I was 11 years old. I could neither read nor write."

—Prospect Magazine. Alexander Gelman tells of being a child during the Second World War and of the deportation of his family and other Jews from the town of Dondyushany, Romania. "Volodya was the first to die. He had been born just before the outbreak of the war. Mama was breast-feeding him. On the third or fourth day's march, her milk gave out and the child died. He died while we were on the move and Mama carried his little dead body as far as the next halt, still on the right (Romanian) bank of the Dniester River. I remember that my father found a handleless spade and began to dig. At that point someone came up and told him that a woman had also died, the mother of people we knew. It was decided to bury the two together. They dug a shallow grave near the river bank and lowered the woman into it. And then on top of her, on to her breast, they laid my little brother wrapped in a cloth. They covered them with soil. And we moved on."'