'YOU just made that up out of blue air," my wife, Laurie Kennedy, said to me.

When I brought this to her attention, she said, "Oh, you're so smart, you must figure you're the greatest thing since chopped bread."

Laurie, thank you so much, is not Mrs. Malaprop. Malapropisms occur when pretentious and stupid people affect a vocabulary that they haven't yet mastered. My wife, by contrast,

When you hear Laurie say, "I worked like a troubadour," instead of "like a stevedore," you think, "Yes . . . I suppose writing and singing lyric poetry are hard jobs, never thought of it that way at all."

Nor is my wife just some commonplace Spooner. (You remember him, William Archibald Spooner, Anglican cleric and teacher, who said, "Let's have a cheer for the queer old dean," when Queen Victoria came to visit his college.)