March 31, 1985

WESTFIELD RUSSELL ARNONE, owner of the International Wines and Liquors store in this affluent Union County community, could not figure out how his competitor down the street could undersell him on many brands, especially since state law requires liquor wholesalers to sell at the same price to all retailers. The competitor, Shoppers Liquor Mart, a newer, larger store, was ''selling things at cost,'' Mr. Arnone said. Then, one day in October 1983, a sales representative from a liquor wholesaler walked in and offered him a ''special deal'' - a bribe - and, Mr. Arnone said, everything became clear. According to Mr. Arnone, the sales representative, a woman, said, ''I got your letter and I'm here to see you.'' ''She got off the parkway,'' he said, ''and she turned left instead of right. She was in the wrong place.'' (Mr. Arnone's store is opposite the NJ Transit railroad station.)

DRIVING eastbound into Columbia on Route 66 the wooded land is seen dotted with a row of ''For Sale'' signs. When the woods end, a string of newly built houses sit across the road from a farm. ''You drive down a road that was completely empty a year ago, and now it has six houses already sold and occupied,'' said Karen Grava Williams, a member of the Town Board of Finance. And while other towns in the state are closing schools, Columbia is contemplating an addition to its elementary school. Columbia, a Tolland County town of 3,500 people about 20 miles from Hartford, is starting to see the growth that has been changing rural communities across the country and affecting their schools, taxes and quality of life.

MEN AND ANGELS By Mary Gordon. 239 pp. New York: Random House. $16.95. THE title and the second epigraph of Mary Gordon's third novel, ''Men and Angels,'' are taken, characteristically, from the Bible, from the familiar passage in I Corinthians: ''Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'' And in this novel Miss Gordon returns once more to a problem that dominated much of ''Final Payments,'' the problem of loving the unlovely. In ''Final Payments'' the narrator, Isabel, who has for many years cared with apparently selfless devotion for her paralyzed father, finds herself on his death confronted with the nature of her own long-suppressed sexuality, and toward the end of the book, shocked by that sexuality's voracious, amoral demands, she retreats into masochistic atonement. She gives up her married lover and goes to live with and care for the woman she most dislikes in the world, her father's former housekeeper, a plain, stupid, mean-spirited and selfish creature whose demands fortunately prove so grotesque that Isabel is finally able to break away.

THERE is an undeniable charm to the look of old houses on old streets. The desire to preserve that charm, for its own sake and for its market value, leads many property owners to seek historic designation for their houses and neighborhoods. Many also are motivated by the Federal tax credits offered for the rehabilitation of designated properties. The designation process does not have to be initiated by officials. It can be started by residents of a city or a suburban neighborhood hoping to form a district, or, in some towns, by owners for their own houses. In Rye, N.Y., for example, a couple have just acquired designation for their 1830 sea captain's house to protect it from an impending bridge project.

BECAUSE euphemism, which is an effort to make something sound specially nice, implies that unless prettified it will be specially unacceptable, a euphemistic formation can easily turn into its opposite. That would be a ''dysphemism,'' a coinage almost as ugly as what it describes. Easy and obvious examples are found in the troubled area of racial names. For many years, ''Afro-Americans,'' ''the colored'' and ''Negroes'' were prevalent as efforts, more or less highfalutin, to say what it is now accepted procedure to express by the word ''black.'' The latest word is notably inexact, since most of the people it designates are different shades of brown, sometimes very light. (It is, to be sure, no more inexact than the word ''white'' applied to a spectrum of faces from pinko-gray to swarthy.) But it is a ''genuine'' word, implying in its very overstatement rejection of all efforts to mitigate or evade the basic facts; it is, in addition, not the word of outsiders.