Forgive my obvious ineptitude here, on many fronts. Firstly, I don't know how to respond to previous responses correctly (capturing the preceding dialog) so I have to start from scratch each time.
Secondly, of course it works...and for me also. Here is what I was doing wrong (somehow?). After modifying my .vimrc, I was entering on the command line: source ~/.vimrc I was getting-not cooperation-but error messages, and of course no good results for my efforts. What I did this time was the wimps' way out-I logged out and back in. And then it works. So the issue was my ineptitude with the bash shell, not with my .vimrc efforts. Don't believe I'm gonna take the time tonight to figure it out, either. Gotta do homework for the job tomorrow. Thanks for your help. And remember, the early bird may get the worm, but the SECOND mouse gets the cheese!