Choosing the word “olio” for use in the title hereof reminds me I’ve resolved this year to read (and try to understand) Lio (the last three letters of “olio”). I’ve struggled with that comic strip and, as a result, had all but stopped reading it.

Lio is a little kid who lives with his dad and some pets. The settings vary from home to school to neighborhood. In today’s episode, Lio prints out a map to Washington D.C. from the Internet, goes to his yard and gives it to an ET whose UFO is parked nearby. I get it.

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I’ve resolved also to read the rest of David Rosenfelt’s novels, of which I wrote last week. I can do one a week, even while teaching this semester. Last week I provided capsules of the first four, so here’s your blurb for No. 5:

In Dead Center (2006), Laurie has moved to Findlay, Wisc. As acting police chief, she’s made an arrest in a double murder. Doubting the guilt of the defendant, she refers him to Andy, who’s 16 hours away in Paterson, N.J. Will Andy take the case? Can he survive a Wisconsin winter? What about his relationship with Laurie? How many crosswords can Edna solve while Andy is out of state?

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I’d resolved this year to stop letting it bother me when people misspell my name. Then the first week of January someone identified me in a YouTube video as Vic Flemming.

Per rhymezone.com, Fleming is the 258th most common surname in the U.S. One in 2,439 families are Flemings. Add an “m,” and the numbers change dramatically. Only one family in 33,333 are Flemmings; it’s the 4,313th most common name. Why, then, do half the people I meet add the extra “m”?

The Flemings, or Flemish people, are Belgians who speak Dutch. They are concentrated in the region known as Flanders and make up about 60 percent of the Belgian population. From what I can tell, Flemming, like Fleming, refers to an inhabitant of the same area of Belgium. I’d call it a variant, but that might offend those whose name it is.

I can find no explanation as to how or when the extra “m” got its start. I did find, however, that in 1998, a Dutch band named Lemming got its start in an obscure studio in Amsterdam. Two years later, due to a legal conflict with another group called Lemming, the band changed its name to Flemming.

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Younger crossword solvers complain about olio and oleo, especially the latter, which is margarine. (The former is a collection of miscellaneous items.) I think they’re great, especially oleo. Youngsters complain that they’ve never heard this word used by a real person.

Lucky me! My grandmother was a real person. When I was 5, I told her I did not like butter very much, but preferred the other stuff. “Oh,” I remember her saying to me, in the kitchen of her home in Mt. Olive, Miss., “you like oleo!” Ironically, her name was Leo.

I hereby resolve to use oleo more in my speech and writing. It’s not a word I want to see die.

Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at [email protected].