Junk English

If George Orwell's ""Politics and the English Language"" were updated and expanded to address today's lexical and syntactic problems the tendency to make verbs out of nouns and nouns out of verbs, a general fondness for business-speak and verbal inflation, just to name a few it might look like Junk English. Ken Smith's (Mental Hygiene; Ken's Guide to the Bible) slim volume is a quirky, pleasingly judgmental dictionary of language crimes. From ""invisible diminishers"" (""virtually flawless"") to technology jargon (""It is simply not natural to use feedback for opinion, [or] synthesis for combination""), Smith will delight language purists with his wit while confirming their grave assessments of contemporary speech.