Stories about tempestuous events and controversial issues bring us lots of mail. The responses are sometimes angry, sometimes supportive, but almost always serious. Lately, however, we have had a number of letters from women in something of a lighter vein. After Senior Writer Lance Morrow wrote the Essay "In Praise of Older Women" (TIME, April 24), he was inundated with notes thanking him for his encouraging insights. But other readers suggested that his double standard was showing. "Since when would men in their 30s be considered older men?" queried one. A young girl had a special complaint. "When I was two, it was terribly fashionable to be a teenager. Now that I'm a teenager, anyone under 30 is considered immature. Will I forever be at the mercy of the demographic bulge?"

In the same issue, an Education story about a limerick contest staged by Connecticut's Mohegan Community College ("A Rich Orgy of Witty Ditties") brought in a batch of limericks in reply. Some readers claimed that the contest limericks did not scan. But most scolded Limerick Judge Isaac Asimov for his assertion that in limerick writing, "women tend to be dirtier but less clever than men." Countered Reader Margaret Mitchell Dukore of Kaneohe, Hawaii:

You say women tend to be "dirty "

More vulgar, less witty (and flirty?)

Well, I'd like to say

To you males (if I may)

You are a tad bit too stuff shirty!

June Gooderham of West Vancouver, B.C., was more severe:

Asimov was a science professor

Who judged women 's rhymes were the lesser

He outraged women 's lib

By telling this fib

And now he must face his confessor.

Asimov, when confronted with the deluge of verses he had caused to descend on us, composed a somewhat conciliatory retort of his own.

Are the women in all things less bright?

I assure you I don 't think that's right.

It's just comic verse

In which they seem worse.

In all else, they are pure dynamite.

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