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Three books, so the story goes, were on the desk of TIME'S editor when TIME'S first issue went to press -- the Bible, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the Iliad.

Of the three, the Iliad seemed to have the most immediate influence on TIME writing. Homer's "wine-dark sea" and "far-darting Apollo" were the parents of "jampacked bowl," "spade-bearded anthropologist" and many another space-saving phrase in TIME.

TIME'S telescoped nouns --"socialite," "radiorator," "guesstimate" -- were similarly coined to get one word to do the work of two or more. This kind of economy led us to use the "&" symbol in such stock combinations as "safe & sane," "ham & eggs," "husband & wife," each of which, as sense goes, is practically one word.

But TIME editors look with loathing on the idea that we hold classes to teach our writers "TIME style." (Some people seem to think we do.) Many a man wanting to write for TIME has been turned down because samples of his work showed he was an imitator of TIME --as he imagined it --instead of a writer of direct, vivid, sense-making English.

Parodies of TIME writing usually begin like "Outraged was snaggletoothed, bilious, ambidextrous Herman Zilch ..." But nowadays TIME editors do not think highly of backward syntax except as an occasional way of emphasizing a point. Spacesaving sometimes forces us to use a string of adjectives to give a thumbnail sketch, but we prefer nouns that make adjectives unnecessary.

In looking for such nouns TIME has introduced some words into everyday speech. The best known is "tycoon" but there have been several others such as "pundit," "kudos," "moppet." We adopted "tycoon" in TIME'S early years after discarding "mogul" and "titan'' as too shopworn, and "hospodar" and "beglerbeg" as too obscure. We needed "tycoon" because otherwise our writers had to beat all around the vocabulary to describe a man of great wealth whose power and influence rivaled those of government heads. In "tycoon" (from the Chinese ta, "great," and kiun, "prince") the Japanese had a word for it. So we borrowed it.

We try to save space with our verbs too. Why say "walked vigorously" if we can say "strode,""marched,""tramped" or "stomped" and be quicker as well as more explicit?

Several years ago a study of TIME'S vocabulary appeared in the magazine American Speech, published by the Columbia University Press. Said the author, "Of all the journalistic phenomena of our age, TIME is linguistically the most interesting. Here for the first time is a popular medium of information whose editors are using the language boldly and freely . . ." TIME'S editors will tell you there is really no such thing as "TIME style"--that what people call TIME style is simply compact, functional newswriting. With much to tell in a few minutes of a reader's time, the language of TIME has to be direct and vivid.

There is one deliberate exception to TIME'S rule of directness: the captions under TIME'S pictures. Many of these are not aimed to tell a story but to advertise some of its curiosities. TIME readers divide sharply in their reactions: some are irritated; some titillated.

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