‘A Gold Mine in Your Home’

As I walk my dog on the streets of Beverly Hills and see our once charming bedroom community being rebuilt into a “throne room community” I think about your front-page article on home trends.

Our amazing new styles can only have come out of some kind of lottery wheel arrangement, into which are thrown a variety of design elements, which are pulled out after a whirl and put into new and amazing combinations. We now see New England dormers atop Greek porticoes, with Tudor windows, Moorish towers, Sears Roebuck shutters, and the final touch, iron-paling fences with gruesome spikes and electronic gates. (Will machine-gunners be next?)

So astonishing is all this that one is forced to invent new terminology, and I have been doing that. Under the generic heading of “apop-clectic” (an adumbration of apoplectic-eclectic) we can now name: geek revival, neo-crappic, p.o.o.-stocene, eye+yawnic . . . and you can play too. It’s a nice diversion and might keep one from throwing up right there on the street.

MARJORIE L. FASMAN

Beverly Hills