After all, today the Dow Jones averages are up several points.

The Dow Jones averages are meaningless to the majority of Americans.

Like the Dow Jones averages, these tallies are indicators - riveting ones.

The quotes on the dollar, the Dow Jones averages and the 30-year Treasury bond are not live.

Three overhead television sets and an illuminated board showing the latest Dow Jones averages vie for attention.

(Dow Jones Averages) becoming a business talk station.

I call this little thing "the High-Interest Business Report," instead of those Dow Jones averages that are on the air every single day.

Compare Dow Jones averages with sunspots and you will find they show a marked sympathy with the cycles - the market rising with sunspot activity.

At the end of June, $58 billion in assets were invested in financial products linked to the Dow Jones averages, up from $13.6 billion a year earlier.

"You cannot budget wisely on a week-to-week basis by reading the Dow Jones averages," said David Umansky, Gandhi's spokesman.

Since last July, the Nasdaq index has been flat, while the Dow Jones averages and Standard & Poor's indexes have been rising.

In 1987, a separate sector for service-agency stocks was created in The Financial Times indexes, the equivalent of the Dow Jones averages.

It would be the first time any of the three Dow Jones averages - industrials, utilities and transportations - has included a stock that was not traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The court decided that the law, as written, included indexes of single industries, and it noted that the long-term correlation of each of the Dow Jones averages and the industries they track exceeded 92 percent.

Because Dow Jones averages are calculated giving the highest weight to the highest-price stock, U.P.S. will become the most heavily weighted stock in the index, topping Union Pacific, the railroad company, which closed yesterday at $58.95.

People won't risk their lives for the U.N. or over the Dow Jones averages, but I wonder in future generations whether there'll be enough vitality left in duty, honor and country to excite our children and grandchildren to defend America.

For those of Mr. Kuttner's persuasion, the crash of the Dow Jones averages may at least have the benefit of suggesting that those who believe in unfettered markets are no better at managing the economy than those who do not.

For years, the indexes were used by The Times and others - including John Kenneth Galbraith, who, in his 1954 book "The Great Crash of 1929," described them as "somewhat more accessible to the nonprofessional observer than the Dow Jones averages."

Yes, whooping crane stock was up a half-million points on the big board, and an investor such as McGhee, who had bought cheap, had every reason to feel smug and to fancy himself on a routine flight when he churned in low over the marshes to check the Dow Jones averages that May.

LEAD: Because of a computer problem, the trading volume for Pacific Gas and Electric Company's stock is incorrect in today's New York Stock Exchange list, the N.Y.S.E. most-active list and the table of Dow Jones averages that shows the volume of component stocks.