THE HISPANIC IMAGE

The Sept. 28 magazine featured a portrait of six Adams-Morgan families: two black families, one Anglo-Saxon, one French, one Asian and one Hispanic. With the exception of the Hispanic family, all were super-achievers, showing wonderful apartments and successful businesses.

The Hispanic family was portrayed as the unemployed husband in a crowded apartment, showing drying clothes hanging from a wire and living in a dwelling described as infested with roaches and rats. This picture of a Latin American family gives us a bad image that we do not deserve.

Your newspaper has the power to create images. It is read by half a million people. The Constitution gives us freedom of expression, and that gives you the right to express your opinion and, for that matter, to create images and public opinion. You should also have the responsibility to be fair and to be aware of the tremendous power you hold. I feel sympathetic with the black community, which had a similar complaint a few weeks ago.

I hope that in the future your newspaper will upgrade our image, showing the hard-working, law-abiding character of our Hispanic citizenry. -- Raul Sanchez A Capital Idea Thomas Vonier is, I suppose, entitled to entertain any opinion he wishes on the artistic merit of the new D.C. license plates {Letters, Sept. 29} . However, before he can criticize the motto on those plates -- ''A Capital City'' -- he has to understand it. The word ''capital'' in the D.C. motto is used in its literary but still widely accepted sense of ''first-rate''or ''excellent,'' and the phrase is intended as a pleasing bit of wordplay.

Which inscription is preferable is a point of personal taste. However, I would almost always choose a motto that shows evidence of thought and reflection over a pedestrian phrase that neither amuses nor educates. Surely even Vonier's 8-year-old daughter could do better than ''Nation's Capital.''

-- Thomas D. Fuller A Map No One Needed May I ask what purpose was served by publishing a map of the Bowie neighborhood where the victims of the recent fatal auto accident lived? Was it so the curious could drive by looking for grief-stricken family members and friends?

Shame on you, Washington Post| Where are your manners? And above all, where is your compassion? -- Francine G. Hughes An Unwarranted Edict Unfortunately Nick Olcott and Tim Westmoreland have labored in vain {Free for All, Sept. 27} . Through no fault of their own, they completely missed the point of my piece on adverbs and adjectives. Several readers have called my attention to a particularly gruesome typo, which made nonsense of the point. David Broder wrote "awfully easily." I quoted it correctly; and my comment obviously had to do with the form of "easily" and not with the form of "awfully." In the process of syndicate editing and transmission, "easily" came out "easy."

As for the other challenges to my grammatical judgment, such things are not susceptible to anyone's edict -- theirs or mine. I tried to take care to argue my points, not to lay them down as if on stone tablets brought down from Sinai or Mount Olympus. Olcott and Westmoreland lecture us with a schoolmasterly air. What matters as a standard in such questions is the everyday judgment of artful users of the language. -- Edwin M. Yoder Jr. A Protester, Not a Vandal I must object to your use of the word "vandal" in the headline on an article about the release from prison of Martin Halladay, who had harmed a nuclear missile {Style, Aug. 26} . I believe the word "vandalized" in the body of the article was also inappropriate.

According to my Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary, a "vandal" -- so named after the 5th century folks who pillaged Rome -- is one "who willfully destroys or defaces property, especially anything beautiful or artistic . . . "; someone who is "wantonly destructive." "Wanton" lists the synonyms "malicious, unprovoked," as in "wanton savagery" (F&W's example).

Halladay did not commit a savage act upon a beautiful or artistic work of humankind. Halladay engaged in a symbolic act of civil disobedience against a Minuteman II nuclear-bomb-armed missile at the ready in a Missouri silo. He was acting as a citizen who chose to commit a personal and political act of conscience. He is not a "vandal," and his act was not "vandalism."

Judge Elmo Hunter merits support and encouragement for his release of Halladay 77 months before his sentence would be up. But the judge also might reconsider his choice of words. He said, according to your article, that Halladay and other Plowshares protesters lead lives that, "other than this one quirk of thinking, are good ones." My F&W defines "quirk" as a "personal peculiarity . . . an evasion or subterfuge." I would suggest that it is highly debatable just whose personalities are quirky these days: the nuclear missile builders or the nuclear missile protesters. -- Richard L. Grossman

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