The Lexicographer's Rules

"Liz taught me a clever way to amuse oneself on the subway, and we played together all the way from Wrigley Field to the Loop. It's very simple: during the clattering cacophony raised by the train while it is running, talk quietly to one another and, as the train slows to enter a station, one person raises his voice and says the most improbable thing they can think of. You should follow your outburst with a chagrined look, as if you did not expect your conversation to be heard over the noise. The object, inasmuch as it can be called so, is to see who can draw the most entertaining looks from the other passengers."

—Bradlands. And then when they beat you silly, you go back to the game where you try to guess which chrome bar isn't greasy and warm.'

"I grew up here. I remember when this place was God's country. People used to come here to see. Now people come here to be seen. That is ego, attitude and affluence. Empty illusory nonsense. They are robbing themselves and robbing us of the peace, quiet, history and relaxation that's actually possible here."

—Newsday. Year-round residents of Southampton, on the eastern edge of Long Island, are just about completely fed up with the bars, the noise and the drunks of the summer visitors.'

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with themÑwith the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them."

—New York Times. Writer Eudora Welty died Monday at age 92. "It took Latin to thrust me into a bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street, where I could walk through it on my way to school and hear underfoot the echo of its marble floor and over me the bell of its rotunda."'

"At a payday loan outlet, she wrote a postdated check for $345 to receive the $300 she would need for the operationÑsuch loan operations charge high service fees up front. That gave her five days to cover the check before it would be cashed. But because her weekly checks were a mere $348 at the time, she knew she couldn't cover it. To avoid bank charges and eventual criminal prosecution, she went back to the loan outlet the following week to refinance. That cost her $50. And on and on it went: $50 every two weeks for four months. At one point, after spending more than $350, she asked how much she still owed. Her balance was locked in at $300. Because of lax state laws, payday lenders can refuse partial payment of loan balances, so borrowers have to refinance every payday for a fee or pay off the full loan."

—Pitch Weekly. Payday loan firms are blatantly usurious, capitalizing upon the lack of financial opportunitiesÑand lack of financial knowledgeÑof the poor. "They're just so open and flagrant about bending and going around the law. They just don't care."'

"The best real estate ploy I've heard so far is that a woman broker for a large real estate company pees in each corner of the property she's selling to 'mark her spot.' She says it helps with sales."

—iHamptons. Also happening in the Hamptons: fallout from a certain traffic accident, a shortage of Wall Street Journals and a gratuitous police-equal-Nazis reference.'