By Kit Hinrichs.

THE collision of language with reality--to tell it like it is--forms the basic of the journalist's art, and occasionally reality imposes new meanings on old words. Such is the case with this week's major study of the welfare system: dictionaries define welfare as a state of happiness and prosperity, of general wellbeing; yet to Americans, whether they are welfare recipients or not, the word has come to mean just the opposite.

More than a month ago, TIME correspondents began exploring that reality, talking with Government officials, caseworkers, the men, women and children who receive welfare. Washington Correspondent Arthur White concentrated on "the lingua franca of welfare--phrases like 'opportunity locus,' 'work disincentives,' 'earnings disregard notch.' Behind the bureaucrats' jargon lie the incredible, numbing statistics that ambush a journalist and work to obscure the flesh-and-blood anguish." Other correspondents reported the very real and growing anguish across the nation, while in New York, Reporter-Researcher Deborah Murphy visited a welfare center to experience firsthand the "debilitation of people sitting, not going anywhere, just sitting, waiting." The story was written by Associate Editor Al Marlens, who could not help finding the situation "as depressing and frustrating to me as it is to the people I was writing about."

Since its beginning in 1965, TIME'S Essay section has grappled with death and taxes, pollution and poverty, violence and revolution. At times it has roamed less serious fields to talk about opera and greeting cards and that extra-chatty seat mate people always seem to find on planes. This week, Essay goes on the road. For a discussion of motorcycles, their pleasures and problems, we turned to Art Critic Robert Hughes. He is the proud owner of a Honda 750, which he parks in the living room of his Manhattan loft, "rather like the Irish taking the pigs into their cottage." His affection for motorcycles began several years ago in London when he borrowed a friend's bike and zoomed off--straight toward a telephone pole. That hazard miraculously avoided, Hughes decided, "This thing is for me. Aside from the London taxi and the Venetian gondola, it's the best form of transport known to man." And that despite its obvious dangers and ear-splitting noise. Indeed, to Hughes, the motorcycle is more than a machine: "It's a very intimate relationship--like a very beautiful and neurotic mistress. You have to keep tinkering with her psyche."

The Cover: Assemblage by Kit Hinrichs.

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