European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - January 12, 1987, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 16 j t.v-, of  f. =.-,column the stars and stripes monday january 12,1967 today s crossword go of hosts Ore born Nof made by Andy Rooney we were invited a dinner at Miriam and Jack Paar s House the other right one of the things i notice about the handful of Well known people i be met Ishow interesting they Are in person. You can usually see How they got there Jack Pur is As Good at the dinner table tit be eve was on the air and As 1 sat there listening to him i had this crass commercial thought. I thought about How much Good material he was throwing away on hit units. A director could have taped the dinner and made a show out of it. Which come to think of it would t be a bad idea. I suppose any performer throws away a lot that could be sold. There ate people who d pay to listen to Vladimir Horowitz when he to just amusing himself on the violin or pay to sit in the bedroom while Lucia no Pavarotti Sang in the Shower not that Jack plays he violin or sings. The Paar Are great hosts. I Don t look Forward to having to pay them Back by inviting them to our House though far several reasons. Not Only Are they better Host than we Are but 1 suspect that Jack is a belter Host than he is a guest. He s itchy. A Host can be itchy and move around among his go Fly but a guest has to pretty much stay put there s no doubt some people Are natural bom hosts and Polhert Are natural bom guests. Jack is Host. There Are several things a Good Host does. When we arrived most of the 16 other Gutsu were already there Jack greeted us before we were three feel inside the door malting us feel As though he d been waiting for us to come. I be gone places where i be thought twas in the wrong House. Hey Jack said grabbing our arms i want you to meet some folks. Some of them you already  he introduced us around without missing a name making everyone feel special in the process. Poor has an infectious enthusiasm for life. You have a Good time when you re with him because his Altitude is catching. He genuinely wanted us o see hit friends his new House his daughter Randi and his grandson Andy. Particularly he wanted us to see his grandson atty at dinner i sat next to Peggy Cass. She d be on Myall Star list of people to sit next to at dinner. She s still limping from a medical disaster i hate to retell be cause it makes me think about it again. She had Carti Lage trouble with one knee and entered a new York Hospital to have a fairly routine operation to fix it. The surgeon went into the Good knee in error real izing his mistake he took Peggy Back into surgery and did the joint he would have done in the first place i left her unable to walk for months. Peggy sued the doctor and won More than $400,000, a judge reduced it to $200,000, but the still so mad she won t accept that. Amer dinner we left the table and Jack took me Down into his basement. He wanted to show me the Little Battery driven tricycle he d bought his grandson. The basement looked like a Cement floored gymnasium with almost no clutter at All. It was perfect for grandson s indoor Tri cycling. The pairs Home could have been a picture in a Magazine. Everything was in its place we could never make our House look like that. Their House is bigger and grander in every Way but i know the answer. It in t the House it s the occupants. The Only Way we d Ever get our House looking like the pairs would be Mohave them move in for a year. We d Swap. J d bring Over my old newspapers the magazines i be been meaning to read the ticket stubs be saved As mementos of old giants games the an new pigskin glow i can t throw away and some of the papers the kids wrote when they were in the third Grade i d spread stuff like that around their living room and have the pairs House looking like our housein no time. Meanwhile they d make ours look like a Page froma Magazine. A trl bum Midas pfc i Snake spoke to eve in French by James Kilpatrick where do words come from the question has absorbed speakers and writers since time immemorial but no linguist Ever has answered the question convincingly and no linguist Ever will. The origins of Lan Guage offer one of the greatest mysteries of Mankind. I fell to pondering these imponderables the other Day when a Tetter come from a gentlewoman in Lin Den Ala. She asked a question that was easily an Cui Pawl Ali can nil Tiffin for nit a i �4h Mimi swered is the Slang term for an easy academic course Crip or crib such a course As every student knows is a Crip  a crib is the concealed slip of paper by which one cheats on a test. Very Well. But How did a Crip get to be called a Crip it make no sense to Trace the word to  Why is a crib a crib the Story is told of the curious child who asked Why an elephant is called an elephant be cause it looks like an elephant his Mother explained. Thai is As Good an emanation As any. The linguists have various theories. None of the holds water. In the beginning it is supposed humans communicated by signs by painting by gesturing. Grunts and exclamations gradually turned Insp accepted words. The sounds of animals probably were convened into human speech. Picture writing led to written symbols and the symbols became words. Our own Western tongues evolved from sanskrit greek and latin. Yet no one knows How the evolution evolved. Mario Pei tells of a respected swedish philologist of the 17th Century who steadfastly maintained that there was no evolution. Languages emerged full blown. In the Garden of Eden this scholar believed pod of course spake swedish but Adam spoke Dan ish and the Snake spoke French. What about eve i leave the mysteries of language to the masters of linguistics. All i can say to my Fawna in Alabama ii that scrip course is a Crip course and there s an end to it the mail raises a few Points of usage. In the Balti More Sun an editorial on the bureaucracy spoke of dividing responsibility Between 14 competing Agen  the general Rule which probably should have been observed Here is that we use Between for two persons or objects and among for More than two. An exception Laj to do with treaties these commonly Are Between France great Britain and the United Stales because each of the signatories ii bound separately to each of the others. A gentleman in King City Ontario writes about the food product that contains three times less cholesterol and the Power Plant that produces four times lesspollution.1 he is puzzled How much is Ibe leu cholesterol which multiplied by three equals the cholesterol in the product in question How much is the less pollution of which the Power Plant will produce four times As much he makes the Point that when we mean one third the cholesterol or one fourth in pollution we ought to say so. In his sixth Survey of contemporary american usage Richard Tobin of Indiana University asked about due to As in the game was cancelled due to  three four los of the responding editors would change due to to  an alternative though it sounds a bit Brit ish is to say that the game was cancelled owing to rain. The trouble with due to is that it creates that Millise cond of doubt whether due conveys a sense of time the plane is due at 5 o clock or a sense of causality be cause leaves no doubts