Netanyahu household a-flutter. Sun-Times man flouts correctness requirements. Homonym issues discussed. The Margaret who grieved, another who did not, glad the sisters made her memorize poetry.

July 1996, remember . . .

A good nan is hard to find . . . Mrs. Netanyahu has been ripped again, by another ex-nanny. She's the wife of Benjamin, new prime minister of Israel and a headliner in her own right. One nanny was fired for burning the soup, the nanny claimed, the other for eating a tomato and other enormities. This one says Mrs. N. is compulsively clean, says she had to wash the clotheslines and clothespins before hanging clothes out to dry.

Mrs. N.: "People who are not clean and are not hygienic always say things like that about clean people."

She's noticed that too?

Talk so straight you could stir your coffee with it (?) . . . Bate your breath every Saturday until you read Jorge Oclander in the Sun-Times. Some weeks back he recalled what a chump he'd been in his cop-baiting college days. On July 6 he praised fairly famous men, Gery Chico and Paul Vallas, who head Chicago's public schools. He's not the first to do so, but is the first, I believe, to puncture the racial correctness that once bedeviled those in charge.

He quotes a former white board member telling of how "disadvantaged" they were in picking a superintendent because the person had to be African-American. "That's the way (it) was done," comments Oclander. "Little about qualifications, talent or record. Just . . . racial and interest-group politics."

He puts our racial correctness in perspective with that: it's not morality or fairness or progressivism, it's politics.

The nation's once "worst schools" are now led by people who reject "social" promotions for kids who don't cut it academically — and have mandated homework.

Homework? Won't that inhibit self-esteem?

Contest, contest! Five seconds to find the homonym in the preceding item. Time! First, remember homonym? Word sounds like another that means something else and is usually spelled differently. So: Bate your breath means hold it, as in abatement -- tax, mosquito, etc. It usually appears in "bated," applied to breath, but my Webster's New World College Dictionary says it's archaic if used as I used it. Webster's is not amused, but I am mildly amused.

So two: Baiting as in cop- is something else. Nyaa-nanny- boo-boo is what any self-respecting baiter says, hoping the other will take the bait, bite, get hooked on your line and sink with it. You heard it here.

Margaret, are you grieving . . . ? That's an opening for a G. Manley Hopkins poem as intro here to more about memorizing poetry -- from Reader Margaret, who is not grieving over what the Sisters of Providence made her do a few years back (quite a few). They are the same sisters who gave their name to Providence-St. Mel High School, a West Side institution of note for its unremitting attention to the minds, hearts, and souls of black folk.

In grade school, not counting dozens of prayers for every occasion, our Margaret memorized the Gettysburg address -- later commemorated by former West Sider Bob Newhart as written on the back of an envelope against advice of a shrewd public relations man.

In high school she and her mates memorized (parts of?) "Lady of the Lake" and lots of Shakespeare, including "The quality of mercy . . .," "Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . .," "To be or not to be . . .," and her favorite: "But look, the dawn in russet mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill."

See? It gives her pleasure still.