Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Britain's Sir Alexander Fleming, 73, winner of a Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin in 1928, announced that at year's end he will retire as head of London's Wright-Fleming Institute of Microbiology, but scarcely to do any loafing. His reason: "[So] I can do more work . . . trying to discover more about immunity to human disease."

At the opening convocation of Brown University, the principal speaker, Yale University's President A. Whitney Griswold, an articulate man who believes that too many of his contemporaries are tongue-tied, rued the passing of the lively art of conversation. Said Dr. Griswold:

"Conversation in this country has fallen upon evil days . . . It is drowned out in singing commercials by the world's most productive economy that has so little to say for itself it has to hum it. It is hushed and shushed in dimly lighted parlors by television audiences who used to read, argue, and even play bridge, an old-fashioned card game requiring speech. It is shouted down by devil's advocates, thrown into disorder by points of order . . . subdued by soft-voiced censors." To Griswold the disorderly noises issuing from the human race may lead to ugly consequences: "Conversation . . . laid the foundation of the civilization we are dedicated to defend. It was conversation of which the New Testament, the greatest teaching ever recorded, was composed . . . Great books, scientific discoveries, works of art, great perceptions of truth and beauty in any form, all require great conversation to complete their meaning; without it they are abracadabra--color to the blind or music to the deaf. Conversation is the handmaid of learning, true religion and free government." His reflections had prodded Dr. Griswold, one of whose hobbies has long been a scrutiny of the academic scene, into a reappraisal of what higher education is all about. Ventured he: "If [Thomas] Carlyle could define a university as a collection of books, Socrates might well have defined it as a conversation about wisdom."

In the Broadway fantasy Ondine, Actress Audrey Hepburn, winner of the best-acting "Tony" award for her role, played the part of a water sprite with fatal charms. Actor Mel Ferrer was cast as a mortal knight who could not resist her despite her sting, finally married her and learned that it was quite a way to die. Broadway kept hearing that Ferrer was not afraid of Audrey offstage either, but when Ondine closed this summer, the couple went their separate ways. Audrey headed for the Swiss resort of Buergenstock to rest. Ferrer wound up on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia to make an Italian film on location. But suddenly, one day last week, the knight was back at the sprite's side and married her without fatal consequences in Buergenstock's miniature mountainside chapel. In Ferrer, 37, Audrey had her first husband. In Audrey, 25. Ferrer, whose knightly charms have led to some confusion at the altar in the past, had a fourth marriage and third wife; he had four children (Pepa, 13, Mark, 10, by wife No. 1; Mela, 12, Christopher, 11, by wife No. 2), remarried wife No. 1, who divorced him last December in Juarez. Friends and relatives wished the newlyweds well as they took off for a Roman honeymoon.

Speaking to the mental health society in Dallas, Topeka's famed Psychiatrist William C. Menninger deplored the tendency of most Americans to lose sight of the mind in their zeal over certain bodies. "Almost every female in her late teens and 20s knows the chest and waist and hip measurements of Miss America," cried he. "In mental health, unfortunately, we do not have such a widely understood set of goals."

The world's zaniest musician, pun-loving, Danish-born Pianist Victor Borge, showed no signs of flagging as he prepared to play his way this week into the second year's run of his one-man Broadway hit show, Comedy in Music. Borge's witty (and programless) keyboard romp has pleasantly parted 230,400 customers from some $775,000 of their money, has outdistanced all long-run records for one-performer Broadway offerings.

In the dim, faraway days when he did not like Reds, French Existentialist Author Jean-Paul Sartre ground out a middling anti-Communist tract in the form of a play called Dirty Hands. Since then, Sartre has changed camps, is now a faithful member in good standing of a Communist braintrust known as the World Peace Council. Last week Turncoat Sartre cried havoc because Dirty Hands was presented at Vienna's Volkstheater. He threatened to sue to keep the curtain from rising, but the play opened as scheduled, naturally proved to be a smash hit, was climaxed by a 30-minute ovation from the audience, which gave the cast 25 curtain calls. Squirming as if he had no exit, Sartre moaned: "I don't disavow Dirty Hands . . . but I don't want to see it produced in one of the neurological centers of the cold war such as Vienna."

To the Army's retired Lieut. General Ben Lear, 75, came a reward for a career of unswerving military precision (which began when he got into the Spanish-American War as a first sergeant): the fourth star of a full general. Ben Lear was a well-rounded enough soldier to ride on the U.S. horsemen's team in the 1912 Olympics, smart enough to serve as General Dwight Eisenhower's ETO Deputy Commander in 1945. But he will probably rack up his chief fame in military annals as the iron-willed disciplinarian ("No mistake should ever go uncorrected") who nearly marched the brogans off a high-spirited battalion of trainees in 1941 after the lads had yoo-hooed at some barelegged girls on a Memphis golf course, where, unfortunately for the G.I.s, the general was also having a game.

The late Poetess Gertrude (Tender Buttons) Stein and her constant companion and autobiographee Alice B. Toklas, used to have gay old times together in the kitchen. Some of the unique delicacies that were whipped up will soon be catalogued by the U.S. publisher, Harper & Bros., in a wildly epicurean tome called The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, which is already causing excited talk on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps Alice's most gone concoction (and also a possible clue to some of Gertrude's less earthly lines) was her hashish fudge ("which anyone could whip up on a rainy day").* Fudgemaker Toklas' impassioned reaction: "This is the food of Paradise. It might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the D.A.R. . . . Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better . . ."

The best-known enlisted man in the world, U.S. Army Private G. David Schine, 27, won a promotion to private first class, was ordered to Alaska as a military policeman.

* Recipe: Over mixed chopped fruit and nuts, throw pulverizations of black peppercorns (1 tsp.), a whole nutmeg, 4 cinnamon sticks, coriander (1 tsp.) and a bunch of dried, powdered cannabis sativa (marijuana plant). Mix sugar (1 cup) with a big pat of butter. Then combine the entire mess into a cake and cut into fudge-sized pieces. "It should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient."

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