February 1, 1989

LEAD: David Shulman just received a most welcome letter. The editor of the Oxford English Dictionary wrote to say the next supplement to the prestigious lexicon would list Big Apple as a synonym for New York City. Heretofore, Big Apple has been listed only as a dance.

LEAD: CATFISH is the Cinderella of seafood, transformed by scientists from a bewhiskered, muddy-tasting, bottom-feeding wild creature into a cultured and cultivated delicacy. Only a few years ago the channel catfish was recognized as a good candidate for farming. Now consumers, chefs and nutritionists are finding the mild white flesh of farm-raised channel catfish tasty and healthful.

LEAD: FOR most people, walking is a simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other. In the cosmic scheme of things, it is up there with sleeping and sitting, something we take for granted, as life shambles along. But there is a new movement afoot.

LEAD: No snow here, so the city is postponing the winter festival that every year but this year turns downtown State Street into a ski run.

LEAD: By raising interest rates substantially in the last 10 months, the Federal Reserve helped extend the nation's long economic expansion, Alan Greenspan, the Fed's chairman, said today.

LEAD: After more than two decades of stumbling in an attempt to become a major player in the automation of the office, the Xerox Corporation said yesterday that it was restructuring some operations, eliminating 2,000 jobs and taking a $275 million pretax charge in the fourth quarter.

LEAD: The hearing on Dr. Louis W. Sullivan as Secretary of Health and Human Services was delayed at the White House's request. Page A14.

LEAD: Fighting Financial Fraud

LEAD: Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, who offended a group of Hispanic people last fall with a remark about drug dealing, met with members of the same group yesterday to try to make amends, but outraged them even more, participants in the session said.

LEAD: Senior Bush Administration officials have met here in the last few days with a leading representative of the Sudanese guerrilla forces as part of a new American effort to try to end the five-year-old civil war in the strategically situated African country.

LEAD: The dollar rose sharply yesterday, moving close to what many traders and economists believe is the upper limit against the West German mark agreed to by Washington and its economic allies.

LEAD: In a disclosure that Wall Street took as a signal of a possible takeover battle, the Robert M. Bass Group said yesterday that it owns 5.6 percent of the Houghton Mifflin Company, a textbook publisher based in Boston.