(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Kindly Dr. Keeping Up entertains still more questions about a certain doctrine that is called comparable worth and also pay equity although numerous characters are suddenly going around worrying whether the two terms are truly synonymous: Dear Kindly: What's all this then about synonyms for comparable worth? And I have a follow-up. The synonym issue occupies center stage. When the House subcommittee on compensation and employee benefits, Mary Rose Oakar, chair, held hearings on comparable worth last month, the question that got the most time was: What is comparable worth? Meanwhile, the linkage between ''pay equity'' and ''comparable worth'' is being attacked from all directions. State the reason for this sudden outburst of linguistic analysis. Many opponents of this doctrine, including Civil Rights Commission Chairman Clarence Pendleton, oppose the linkage because it gives an ''unfair rhetorical advantage'' (Clarence's words) to a cause that has been identified by some (including Clarence) as ''the looniest idea since Looney Tunes hit the screen.'' But many proponents, including Washington Post editorial writers, also find the equation nervous-making. Dear Dr. Up: And what has caused the Grahamites to lose their cool? Just like their kindred spirits on the New York Times, they worry that comparable worth is excessively dopey in assuming the existence of a ''fair'' wage unrelated to market forces, but they hate to attack an idea widely held to be, um, progressive. So how did the Post deal with this classic dilemma of liberal editorializers? The usual way: it redefined the issue. It said that nobody nowadays is talking about the ''wholesale restructuring of wages'' implied in comparable worth and that pay equity -- the term it prefers -- would actually permit employers to have different pay scales for female-dominated jobs, provided that the employers were not collusively holding down the wages of secretaries, say, or otherwise practicing sex discrimination. Dear Keeping: Either your presentation is tendentiously incomplete or the $ Post's endorsement of pay equity means only that it's not advocating repeal of existing antitrust and civil rights legislation.

Although terse for reasons of economy, our exposition has been nonlacunal. Dear Dr.: Are any other liberals taking the synonym route in attempting to solve their comparable-worth problems? Among the big redefiners is Mary Rose herself. Long identified as a big booster of comparable worth, she now ''prefers to use the term 'pay equity,' which is the elimination of sex-based wage discrimination.'' So she too is making a big deal out of her opposition to something that's already illegal. Dear Up: With the worthers no longer hoping to restructure society, did Mary Rose's hearings turn out relatively harmonious? No, acrimony was ever in the air, and especially when Civil Rights Commission member Mary Berry, a Carter holdover, started advancing ad hominem arguments against Reaganites who have imposed their views about comparable worth on the EEOC. Are you suggesting that this lady does not believe in a strong central government? That would be somewhat hard to argue, given her prior sympathetic remarks, in a book co-authored in 1982, about ''Russia's constitutional safeguards for minorities.'' Dear Kindly: And you claim to be against ad hominem cracks? No, life would be too dull.