In the end, she went back to spells and sorcery to come up with a looser set of trousers she could wear with her boots and a light overtunic - both in green.

But a looser set of rules of engagement were adopted during the siege - allowing the agents to shoot on sight virtually anyone who was armed - and the F.B.I. has been roiled ever since by investigations into who approved the change.

Herbal supplements, however, are regulated by a looser set of standards.

As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow.

"It was the loosest set I've been on," says Ms. Davis, who has starred in such films as David Lean's "Passage to India" and Tim Burstall's "Kangaroo."

The policy lays out two distinct sets of guidelines: a broad prohibition on profiling in traditional and often routine law enforcement investigations; and a looser set of standards for national security cases.

Without formal rules and regulations, pick-up games are often played with a looser set of rules which are sometimes established by the players themselves.

And in Minneapolis, Steve Wetzell, executive director of the Buyers Health Care Action Group, a Minnesota-based organization of big employers, said, "Virtually every care system that we contracted with has created a looser set of rules."

In the meantime, like everyone else, he had to translate the arcane precepts of his ancient religion into a somewhat looser and vaguer set of rules called ethics, or values.