Los Angeles--Singular or plural, pro or con, right or wrong, it’s a phrase unlike any other

My argument that we who live here are “Angelenos,” not “Los Angelenos,” has not been successful with Ray Rosenbaum, the publicist, who first wrote me to champion “Los Angelenos.”

My point that while “Los Angelenos” might do for all of us, no one of us could be a “Los Angeleno,” since the article Los is plural and must be followed by a plural noun. I said there was no such thing as a “Los Angeleno.”

Rosenbaum responds: “I agree that Los is a plural article and should be followed by a plural noun. However, the rule seems to be broken when applied to cities. Otherwise a Las Vegan would be called a Vegan. He is not. You may remain an Angeleno. I am a Los Angeleno. That’s the definite article.”

Sam Cashdan of Santa Monica writes: “I am surprised that you do not acknowledge the singular quality of Los Angeles. I refer to your article in today’s Los Angeles Times, which are a fine newspaper. Or would you rather I said ‘which are fine newspapers.’ ”

Why quibble about Mr. Cashdan’s grammar as long as he speaks so well of us?

Of course Los Angeles is a plural phrase, but as a place name it functions as a singular. That does not mean that the plural Los can be joined to a singular Angeleno .

As for Las Vegans, I don’t care what they call themselves. That town gives me the creeps.

The word Angeleno is in question itself. John D. Weaver, author of “Los Angeles: The Enchanted Village,” has made a strong historical case for “Angelino,” and the word is spelled that way in the 1985 Encyclopedia Brittanica article on Los Angeles, which Weaver wrote. Whether we are Angelenos, Angelinos, or Los Angelinos, we are certainly among the most envied, and therefore, the most maligned people on Earth.

Cary G. Darling, assistant editor of BAM, the music magazine, sends me a copy of an article written for the Australian magazine Follow Me, by an Australian, Jillian Burt.

Her article is called “Travels from the Sublime to the Ridiculous,” meaning from New York to Los Angeles, and it is loaded with such thoughtful observations as this:

“I’m convinced that Los Angeles is God’s warning to the world: ‘If you’re a bad person you’ll become like this and be forced to live in Los Angeles.’ ”

She goes on:

“I hated L.A. instantly, recoiled from it as a vampire does at the sight of a crucifix. It struck me as an astonishing waste of space, and just plain unpleasant. It was constantly hung with a curtain of smog and a sticky, grubby humidity that smelled of old hippies. There seems to be no good reason for Los Angeles to exist. . . .”

Perhaps her keenest perception was about us Angelenos: “The natives of L.A. all speak in that confidential, revelatory tone as though they are rehearsing for a talk-show appearance.”

I always wonder what people who come to such conclusions must have done with their time while they were here. Evidently Ms. Burt spent her evenings watching television: “I’d watch a bank of five talk shows a night in L.A. starting off with Merv Griffin--going through Carson--and finishing up with David Letterman. Spectator bloodsport with smiling obsequious phonies.”

I wonder if she couldn’t get a date.

Ms. Burt said she read “Hollywood Wives” while living in the very neighborhood that that voluptuous TV miniseries was set in, and concluded that, “It doesn’t read like fiction. It seems like straight reporting.”

She reports that she spent “what must have amounted to hours on the phone to a friend in New York talking about why I felt that Los Angeles could send a man straight to hell and trying to unravel the mystery of my infatuation with New York. . . .”

Since Ms. Burt seems to have spent so much of her time here reading, talking on the telephone to New York and watching talk shows on TV, I wonder how she got acquainted with the fast set in Beverly Hills, to find out that they really live as they appeared to in “Hollywood Wives,” and to pick up our confidential, revelatory manner of speaking.

“By the end of my stay in Los Angeles,” she says, “the Australians were the only people I felt I could talk to. The glued-on California smile and overeager hospitality started to take on a sinister edge. Californians spend so much time working out on their bodies that the flab collects on their minds.”

Two years from now, I promise you, Ms. Burt will be living in Malibu, getting sloshed in the morning and having friends over for cocktails and barbecued ribs.

A much more perceptive view of Los Angeles is in “Letter from L.A.,” by Hillary Johnson, in Vogue, which has been sent to me by Heather Smith of Fountain Valley.

“Los Angeles feels make-believe,” it begins, “as if desert loomed behind the storefront. It’s the cumulative effect of certain details: the manicured greenery, the riveting movie billboards, the pink glow that rims the horizon at dusk. The city inspires a readiness to imagine all kinds of private possibilities; it’s a fantasy island where people can hope to reinvent themselves in mid-life. A more potent lure is hard to imagine.

“Los Angeles is humming with immigrants, professionals from big urban centers--Boston, Chicago, New York--who are high on the weather, the natural beauty, and the nearly palpable sense that anything is possible here. . . .”

Now how could Ms. Burt have missed all that?