WHEN IT COMES TO being rather economique with the old verite, as the French might or might not say, there are few phrases in the English language to beat "I do," "the check's in the mail" and "a zillion dollars change my life? Never!"

If and when you are in earshot of any of those three chunks of verbiage, it's time to reach for a few grains of salt and start measuring the growth rate of nearby noses.

I speak as a four-time veteran of the first category, and only as applied in the final instance has "I do" not shortly become "naw, I don't, really." One of the earlier partners joined the ex-partner ranks when she became an avid practitioner of the "check's in the mail" ploy.

(This was in a day when my pay was about $68.50 a week, and to give her credit she would never think of writing a $70 check without at least dropping a hint. But she would never hesitate to write seven $7 checks in the same day with nary a word about it, with the result that check-kiting became an Olympic standard sport in the Webb household.)

The third of the above-mentioned phrases concerns the sudden arrival of six tons of loose cash on one's doorstep in the form of a lottery or pools win and the almost inevitable remark by the recipient as he/she wallows in it that "this here 89 umptillion dollars/pounds/marks/yen/zlotys/foufous won't make any difference in my lifestyle, no siree, Bob."

The lucky fool goes on to allow as how certainly he intends to be swinging his pickaxe at the coal face as usual tomorrow morn, and she can't wait to get back to teaching trig during breaks in the playground gunfights, and neither has any intention of leaving their cozy family home with its friendly cockroaches, mice and outdoor plumbing.

Sure. And pigs will fly, cats will clean out their own litter trays and Bill Clinton will give up cigars.

What we are talking about here, folks, is the Nobel Prize in Greed. As a winner of big bucks, perhaps you're inclined to parting with a few shekels to help prevent hangnails in duck-billed platypuses or to build comfy nests for the Great Purple-Speckled Grackle. Human nature suggests you are more likely, as Time magazine suggested a couple of years ago, to think in terms of buying the Chicago Bulls or dining morning, noon and night at McDonald's for the next 3,500 years.

My wife Elizabeth and I spend about 12 bucks a week doing the National Lottery in Britain, and have done so since it started, back around the time the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were getting their first trim. So far, our winnings have been sufficient to reduce our losses by about 0.016 percent, or to pay the electric bill to watch the results on TV.

(The lottery jackpot involves picking the six winning numbers between 1 and 49. The odds are 14 million to one against, about equal to the chances of getting hit nine times in the same year by a block of frozen urine from a passing jetliner and 22 times worse than the chance of falling to your death from a barstool, although marginally better than the odds of understanding IRS Form 1040 on first reading.)

It's not as if we aren't trying. Elizabeth is on the fifth variation of a number-selection scheme based, I think, on her birthday, her home address in 1959, the price of organic eggs at Tesco's supermarket on March 19 two years ago and the position of Mars on the cusp of the moon in Taurus the night our cat Coco first barfed down the TV screen.

Mine is rather more simple, being the product of my Social Security number multiplied by my overdue tax for 1999-2000 plus 10 times the price of eggs in China on St. Patrick's Day divided by the square of my root canal. Which should produce a winning lottery combination, or perhaps my laundry bill or the GNP of Burkino Fasso in 1997.

Whatever, the point is not so much in winning (if it were that easy, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this, now would I?) but in plotting to do with the mountain of greenery on the (very) off-chance that we did. I figure that so far, we have spent any conceivable amount - and quite a few inconceivable ones - 26 times over.

Elizabeth's dreams center on what she calls philanthropy and I call do-goodism - supporting worthy causes (of which I am not considered one) and the like. My ideas have been more practical, like renting white tie and tails, hiring a coach and four horses, driving down to Fleet Street, confronting a particularly obnoxious boss of the time at a financial news agency and submitting my resignation by shoving a jalapeno up his derriere.

But nowhere in all this have we for once entertained the idea that our lives would be unchanged by sweeping the lottery - and the odds are that any winner who says differently is fibbing. The British lottery people say that of those who have won $3 million or more, 73 percent have elected to tick "unemployed" on their tax forms.

While work is doubtless the curse of the drinking class, I gather it's not really easy street down on Easy Street. Money Magazine not long ago profiled a pair of lottery winners, an Ohio couple named John and Sandy. What their luck brought them were a call from a woman wanting $65,000 to escape her abusive husband and inventors who wanted funding for their perpetual motion machines and the like.

John and Sandy lived in fear of being burgled, they became stressed out over how to manage the $12.4 million they had raked in, and their kids lost all their old friends. "In talking with the other members of their winning lottery group," according to one report, "some said they wish it had never happened."

Well, I think that last is taking things a bit too far. The key is not to let money hang around long enough to start festering. My plan is to follow the example of the lady who, asked what she planned to do with the jackpot she had won on Britain's soccer pool, promptly replied: "Spend, spend, spend!"

No chance there of stress lurking about, making a nuisance of itself.

Thought for the Week: In the dark, all cats are gray, except for the ones with purple polka dots.

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