The General Assembly of the United Nations has voted, 164 to 1, to encourage the wider use of a map that shows the continents in their true relative proportions. The lone dissenting vote was cast by the United States, whose representative described the measure as a "radical ideological project." In the interest of clarifying the terms under dispute, the following entries are offered.

The lexicographer's labor is never finished. Language, like the republic it describes, corrupts by increments too small for any single citizen to notice, until one morning he wakes to find that self-defense means something his grandfather would not have recognized, and that a man may be murdered by an adjective. I offer the following supplement to my dictionary, compiled from the public statements of officials who, I am assured, mean every euphemism they utter.

A man who wishes to be remembered has two methods available to him. The first is to do something worth remembering. The second, far less strenuous and vastly more popular among heads of state, is to have his name engraved on things that were doing perfectly well under their previous ones. I bring this up because the news this week supplies two specimens of the second method in such close proximity that a lepidopterist would be forgiven for pinning them to the same board.