(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which your correspondent resumes his never-explained custom of propounding ornately long-winded questions absolutely none of which seem to get a real response, although to be utterly fair some may have triggered the subscription cancellations for which this department is increasingly famous and especially among the circulation folks downstairs: -- Can it really be four years since we last kneed the U.S. Treasury Department in the groin for mindlessly supporting the non compos provision of the Tax Code under which gamblers everywhere incur a legal obligation to report all their betting income without exception, even though the Internal Revenue Service itself half expects them to ignore the requirement, or so we inferred in 1984 based on the highly indicative fact that the IRS research division had just published a huge scholarly study breaking down the country's ''unreported income'' but not even bothering to include unreported legal gambling winnings as part of this figure, and now they have done the exact same thing again in the just-released 1988 study? -- Can the U.S. continue to get along without a word analogous to ''sexist,'' ''racist,'' ''ageist,'' etc. but applicable to the suddenly germane case of the person who discriminates against the hearing impaired, and how come there was so little support for ''earist,'' which turned up in an early Washington Post account of the row at Gallaudet University -- where the students at this institution for the deaf were demanding that it hire a deaf president -- but then never got mentioned again in the media's telling of the tale? -- Which hot new social problem has recently surfaced in the world of social work and is now guaranteed to explode on the talk shows? Can the country long endure without spending money on this problem, or will the loot continue to be lacking because, as Murray A. Straus of the University of New Hampshire and Richard J. Gelles of the University of Rhode Island jointly kvetched in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, ''it has not been defined as a problem''? What is the most controversial subject recently addressed by the journal Social Work? Will anybody believe it when we report that the foregoing questions allude to . . . battered husbands? And that we read about this burning issue in of all places Insight, a highly conservative publication sponsored by the Reverend Moon? And that the Insight reporter took the issue quite seriously, managing to generate numerous colorful details and quotes (''Once she threw a vacuum cleaner at me'') but unfortunately neglecting to give the telephone number of the men's counseling service mentioned there on the last page? -- Would Congress be planning legislation and otherwise evidencing passionate concern about privacy in the video rental market -- a concern that initially floated to the surface during the Bork hearings, when a journalistic wisenheimer rushed into print with details about the movies earlier rented by the Supreme Court nominee -- if the median Congressperson had been as boringly committed as the judge's family to old Cary Grant movies? -- Will the people who personally write in to Kindly Dr. Keeping Up with suggestions about comment-worthy material understand that this time we cannot thank them individually, as our supply of stationery is limited and the entire readership seems to have gravitated to that Wall Street Journal item about the female surgeon who convinced a jury that William Beaumont Hospital in Troy, Michigan, had discriminatorily kept her from working on its premises, the bias in question being centered on her narcolepsy -- a handicap that causes you to fall asleep at inappropriate moments -- and obesity, all of which resulted in a $600,000 damages award? -- In the wake of United States of America v. Starrett City, will the country's liberals give up trying to rewrite yet another civil rights program, the problem this time being that they wish to permit racial quotas in housing projects, which is plainly forbidden by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, but which they almost unanimously now view as desirable because they feel quotas are sometimes needed to prevent white flight and preserve integration, although they have a little trouble telling you why integration is so desirable when achieved by barring minorities?