Nothing in English has been ridiculed as much as the ambiguous use of words, unless it be the ambiguous use of sentences. Ben Franklin said, ``Clearly spoken, Mr. Fogg. You explain English by Greek.'' Richard Brinsley Sheridan said, ``I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two.'' And a witty American journalist remarked over a century ago what is even more true today, ``Many a writer seems to think he is never profound except when he cann't understand his own meaning.''

There are many types of ambiguity and many of them have been described by rhetoricians under such names as amphibology, parisology, and other ologies. In common parlance they would be described as misses -- misinterpreters, misunderstanders, misdirectors and kindred misdeeds.

One species of ambiguity tries to baffle by interweaving repetition. ``Did you or did you not say what I said you said, because Jane said you never said what I said?''

Another woman, addressing Christmas cards, said to her husband: ``We sent them one last year but they didn't send us one, so they probably won't send us one this year because they'll think we won't send them one because they didn't last year, don't you think, or shall we?''

Such ambiguous exercises compound confusion by making it worse compounded, and they are sometimes expanded until the cream of the jest sours. Ambiguity of a non repetitious kind describes the dilemma one girl found herself in. ``I'm terribly upset,'' she told a girl-friend. ``I wrote Bill in my last letter to forget that I had told him that I didn't mean to reconsider my decision not to change my mind -- and he seems to have misunderstood me.'' Evidently Bill was another of those men who simply don't understand women.