In eight years of reporting on Arab-Israeli diplomacy and violence since the 1967 war, newsmen have become alert to the subtle nuances of Middle East peacemaking. While it was no secret that a new Sinai accord was in the air, TIME correspondents in Washington, Jerusalem and Cairo saw unofficial signs that the talks had reached a critical stage well before any word that Henry Kissinger might be resuming his shuttle diplomacy. "When the two sides -- and their American intermediaries -- are at odds," explains State Department Correspondent Strobe Talbott, "then official sources are more likely to let information out to tell their side of the story." Last week, Talbott noted, "was a classic case of negotiations becoming leakproof as all sides moved closer to agreement." In Jerusalem, Bureau Chief Donald Neff assessed the impending settlement's durability in talks with a hawk-to-dove spectrum of Israeli leaders.

Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn saw the renewed diplomatic activity as vindication of a personal optimism that survived the hostile Arab-Israeli rhetoric of recent months. "If you stuck to the declarations of leaders on both sides," Wynn reports, "you could make a good case for the impossibility of an agreement." Wynn saw signs of new diplomatic motion as far back as last April. One evening a few weeks after the end of Kissinger's earlier try at a peace agreement, American Ambassador Hermann Eilts failed to show up at a Cairo dinner party where he was to be guest of honor. Wynn learned that Eilts had been abruptly called back to Washington. Eilts' trip turned out to be the first of seven, shuttling peace proposals between Anwar Sadat and the State Department.

In preparing for the three-page story in this week's Education section on the ragged state of the English language in the U.S., Senior Writer Lance Morrow spent two months off and on compiling examples of mangled prose from such varied sources as the Congressional Record, high school compositions and sociological journals. Morrow also kept a notebook -- which swelled to 60 pages -- of tortured usages found in everyday reading, television watching and conversation. In some ways, it was a chastening exercise. Morrow found that he frequently sinned, most often in using careless conversational "filler" phrases like "you know" and "well, ah." Colleagues who have chatted with him recently say that his speaking style is, ah, much improved.

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