Words: Kvell, v.

CONTROVERSY OVER Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi abates, and along comes Paul Rudnick's hot-ticket, off-Broadway item The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. According to the New York Daily News, "in the play's opening, Adam (the hunky Alan Tudyke) appears clad only in a jockstrap, kvelling over Eden - only, he says, `I would put the lake over there'."

From the Yiddish kveln, to be delighted, it means boast or gloat, which the OED dates to 1967. Leo Rosten suggests earlier use: "Your children make you kvell." It had new impetus with the movie Clueless - "my heart is totally bursting . . . I know I'm kvelling" - but is absent from Wentworth and Flexner's American Slang, with which one has to be content until Random House reaches O-Z.