LEND ME YOUR EAR:> AS LONG AS WE ARE THANKFUL...

Although Thanksgiving is not an official church holiday, it is a national holiday in our country, and in England and Canada as well. In America, the official day is the last Thursday in November, and special services are held in many churches all over the land, inviting the grateful to thank God for all the benefits bestowed upon them daily, though too often taken for granted.

Today is Wednesday, Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving 1992. Time to pause and give special thanks for all our blessings for family, friends, schools, churches, work, play, and the countless comforts and freedoms we enjoy because we live in the United States of America.

For this aging writer, Lend Me Your Ear is high on my list of blessings. Working with words and how to make the most of them with appreciative readers who sometimes call just to say they learn from these columns gives me good reason to thank God every day for the privilege of doing something helpful to others at my time of life.

The word "thank" has been in the English language since the year 1160. It would take more than a magnifying glass for me to read the print in the OED, but the date is in black type. If my memory still serves, our word probably derives from the German danke, pronounced DONKa. I learned this from my paternal grandmother, who may have been trying to teach me manners.

Along with "thank" came "thanks", followed by "thankful", "thankless", "Thankfully", "thankworthy", and by 1533, "thanksgiving" was defined as a "Supper of Lord" in the Anglican Church. Through the years, a number of idiomatic uses have also been added to the basic "thank."

To be fair to ourselves, we are more thankful in general than we realize. How many times do we say "Thanks!" in the course of a day? We mean "I thank you", or simply "Thank you", with the subject understood. But "Thanks!" is a whole sentence, and we are always in a hurry. At least we take time for the proper all-inclusive word.

"Thankfully" was late in entering our language. The term was first noted in 1963, in Saturday Review. However, it was used in the same sense in which many people use "hopefully", which continues to be trashed by skillful writers, and most rejected the coinage. To say, "Hopefully, the train will be on time" is to say the train hopes to be on time an abusage explained in these columns before. Authorities are less critical of "thankfully" because of the extensive opposition to "hopefully", but few condone the usage. Better just to be thankful if the train is on time.

"Thank God" or "thank goodness" is acceptable idiom in Britain, America, and Canada. "Thanks to" has appeared in formal writing as a prepositional phrase since the 18th century if not earlier, and is used to convey meanings positive and negative: "Thanks to the applicant's experience, the board hired her though she had not completed requirements for an advanced degree." Positive, without question. But, "Thanks to John Baker's indiscretions, his little girl was not invited to her best friend's party." No thanks there, for sure.

"No thanks" is another useful idiom, and another way of expressing dislike. "Thanks a million", in my book, has been replaced by "Thanks a jillion", meaning more than can be counted: a million means nothing any more. Ask any politician or banker. (Don't bother to ask General Motors.)

"Thanking you in advance" has come under fire as being trite, to say nothing of presumptuous or even insulting. We could be presuming too much in supposing our request will be honored and insulting if the person we are thanking thinks we think he won't know enough to respond according to Hoyle or Miss Manners.

For a brief time, I was half-guilty of committing the thanking-in-advance gaffe. In correspondence with friends familiar with our area, I wrote: "Thanking you in Advance, I remain in Cape Girardeau." However, it was a poor joke because I was not in the town of Advance while writing my thank-you, and recipients were soon (perhaps thankfully) spared.

Finally, a word about the custom of giving thanks at table. In our family, we gave thanks at the beginning of the meal, and returned thanks at the end. Some families "return thanks" before digging in. But as long as we are thankful, why quarrel over the semantics? It's the feeling that matters.

Most members of my generation, I suspect, will feel thankful tomorrow morning if the Lord awakens us to another day.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING