This Sunday morning, I am committed neither to the church which I have been serving for the last nine months nor to my own congregation, to which I will return next Sunday. In describing this sublime estate in a note to a friend, I used the phrase "playing hookie" to which MicroSoft's spell checker objected, insisting that what is being played is "hooky." Could be.

Some words are, I think, mostly oral and some mostly written. Hooky is, it seems to me, what you say more than what you write.

I know exactly what I mean by it, but what does it mean?