Notes & Asides.(Letter to the Editor)

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Please tell the Rev. Born, whose letter about the Bronx appeared in the Jan. 28 issue, that it's no mystery to me how the "cks" elided into "x." I think it happened because of careless reading or dyslexia. With the correct spelling of our last name before them, people frequently address us as Mr. & Mrs. Franks. They seem to transpose the c and k and make the c sibilant. It's also difficult to get our name spelled correctly, but that's another story. Sincerely, Suzanne Franck Hockessin, Del.

-- Dear Mrs. Franck: Well, I sympathize. But then you could consider respelling your name! Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Was the salutation "Dear Rev. Born" (Jan. 28) a clever, if abstruse, joke or were you confusing a title of honor with a title of office? Would you address your junior senator "Dear Hon. Clinton"? Perhaps Mr. Born did not indicate his clerical office, so you followed the Jesse Jackson rule: Use Rev. when the person addressed wishes to be honored but seems to hold no office. Yours sincerely, Jack M. Bethards San Francisco, Calif.

-- Dear Mr. Bethards: Quite right. The wild misusage does indeed corrupt. Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Yale University Professor Smith's revisionist definition of "Country" perfectly exemplifies the doublespeak on parade ("Searching for God and Man at Yale," Dec. 31). With acuity, you estimate the situation here on the ground.

Even the term "American Revolution" has a new -- false and ominous -- definition among some at Yale. In the 1960s, hip youth insisted that adults should step aside, as Bob Dylan sang, to "get out of the road if you can't lend a hand." Today the parade of nastiness proceeds at a faster clip: Recently one of my classmates tunelessly stated, "There are a lot of people in the way of the revolution, and if we don't want to ...