ENGAGED. Marie Osmond, 19, distaff half of ABC-TV's toothily wholesome Donny and Marie duo; and Jeff Crayton, 23, a college student and actor; in Orem, Utah.

DIED. Neil Jacoby, 69, conservative economist who was dean of U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Business Administration and served on President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. A free-market champion ("Adam Smith was the prophet"), Jacoby was warning about high inflation as long ago as the late 1950s, and argued that the proper cure was not controls but a curb on the red ink flowing out of Washington.

DIED. George Brent, 75, Irish-born film heartthrob of the '30s and '40s best remembered as the surgeon who loves but cannot save Bette Davis in the classic 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory; of emphysema; in Solana Beach, Calif.

DIED. Kurt Jooss, 78, German choreographer renowned for highly dramatic, topical ballets, of which the most acclaimed was his 1932 pacifist masterpiece, The Green Table; of injuries suffered in a car accident; in Heilbronn, West Germany.

DIED. Eric Partridge, 85, indefatigable English lexicographer and student of the language's quirks and conventions; in Devon, England. Born in New Zealand and educated in Australia and at Oxford, the tall, spare Partridge abandoned a budding career as an English professor (he feared he would become "a bloody bore") to devote himself to publishing and writing. Though he once turned out a novel in a month for his Scholartis Press in London, he gave up fiction to make a profession of his passion: the study of words. Over five decades, he compiled 16 erudite lexicons devoted to slang, cliches and other aspects of the language; his last effort, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1977), contained 3,000 entries. "The Word King," as Critic Edmund Wilson dubbed him, savaged linguistic abuses (he found American sociopsychological jargon especially "pitiable") and saluted plain, popular usage. Language, he said,'"was created by people, not in a laboratory."

DIED. Mary Pickford, 86, "America's Sweetheart"; of a stroke; in Santa Monica, Calif. (see SHOW BUSINESS).

DIED. Lou Little, 87, peppery football coach at Columbia University for 26 seasons beginning in 1930; of a heart attack; in Delray Beach, Fla. Little's teams were famous for upset victories, among them a 1934 Rose Bowl win over Stanford, but his most enduring legacy was a winning-isn't-the-only-thing philosophy that was reflected in the de-emphasis of football throughout the Ivy League in the 1950s. The sport, he worried, had become "a sensible game surrounded by crazy people."

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