I FINALLY GOT THE BOOK alluded to in the intro to my previous diary off my desk today. It has to rank as one of the most pretentious books I've ever read due merely to the fact that in includes the word "antediluvian" twice. I firmly believe that it is one of those words that should be legally limited to one use per book, if you cannot fight the overwhelming compulsion to use it at all.

In the same hifalutin, thesaurus-abusing vein, the book also featured a word that was new to me: "tonsorial." Although it sounds like it describes an operation using a tongue depressor, it's actually the haircut equivalent of "sartorial," a word I would probably never have met if I hadn't, once upon a time, worked on a series of books about clothes -- when InStyle magazine meets Prestigious Literary Imprint, that's the kind of word that turns up in marketing copy.

Also in the same book, I had occasion to query whether the author would prefer to use "homie" instead of the spelling "homey," even though Web 11 lists both as equal variants. (Yes, I looked up the spelling. Yes, I am a dork. I take some comfort, however, in being paid to be a dork in just this way.)

My parting shot was flagging the last page to ask, "Is there more of this book to come? Because this isn't an even number of signatures." The number of pages in a book has to be divisible by 4 -- you can prove this experimentally by taking a sheet of paper, folding it in half, and observing that you have created a 4-page booklet. Fold that in half again, staple in the middle, slit along the original fold you made, and you've got an 8-pager. And so on. It's traditional (and economical) to print books in multiples of 16 -- almost every book you own has a number of pages divisible by 16, regardless of what the last numbered page is. Anyway, there were 266 pages in the book. Divide that by 4 and ... they fail it. They also seem to have gone to great effort to make the book come out to exactly this length, however. Not sure what's going on there, because it really doesn't need a 6-page index.

THIS REMINDED ME of a time when a co-worker of mine, W, got a call about a book we'd recently published. It was from someone in-house, who apparently had a friend who had a copy of this book that was "missing page 20." W said she'd try to figure out what was up with it and get back to her. She hung up and announced to the Pod, "That person said they have a book that's missing page 20."

"What do you mean, missing page 20? Is it blank? Or just not there?"

"I dunno, she didn't really say."

"What about page 19?" The two pages are pretty much inseparable, being literally two sides of the same sheet.

"Hmm, I guess I'd better call back and find out." Since it was a "my friend has this book" kind of deal, the other person had to call the friend and then get back to us. Finally W's phone rang again: "She said that it's not blank, but it says 'copyright 1998 by ...' on it. Page 19 is fine."

"Can she look on page 4? The one after the title page? What's on there, if the copyright is on page 20?"

Another round of Telephone later, the answer came back: "Oh ... it's page 20."

YESTERDAY, M DROPPED THE PAGES for a book on my desk and announced, "Here's the foul Ho."

I should have said, "Now that's not nice, I thought we liked this author," but I didn't because what she'd said was technically correct.

The book features the sentence "Step away from the glue gun, yo" and, in one of those words-that-appear-in-more-than-one-book-I'm-reading coincidences, the author spells it "homie."

INOTHERNEWS, there's a new microwave in the office kitchen. I'm not sure what was wrong with the old one, but the new one is a brushed-metal number that's sort of space-age (though I wonder if that word should now be used to mean "retro" more than "ultra-modern") and minimalist in design. The numbers are arranged in a ladder of elongated press-panels instead of the usual grid. They are labelled in bright teal as well as in Braille.

In the bottom left corner of the panel is a button labelled in smallish, compressed capitals that reads: "SELECTATIME." I came across L using the new microwave for the first time, and she pointed it out to me: "At first I couldn't figure out how it worked, until I realized what it said. I was like, 'Sel-eck-tah-tee-may? What's that? Oh, Select-a-time.'" (Those of you who think this sounds silly, I've heard the name of the Alewife T-stop pronounced with twice as many syllables as it should have.)

The subject came up again this morning, and J mentioned that she'd come across a similar thing recently. She was reading about a new site, supposedly the male counterpart to DontDateHimGirl.com. "I was reading the address, and it was, 'Don't Date Herman.' And I thought, 'That's an odd name for the site ...'"