This book is an abridgment of my Dictionary of Modern American Usage, published in 1998. The idea behind abridging that book was to produce a handy paperback that discusses the most common problems of usage and style.

In reading through this book, you might get the idea that the language has gone to pot. In fact, though, the language never was in a pristine state: things are always changing, sometimes for the worse. The purpose of a usage guide is to promote the good and combat the bad. If you're a writer or editor, the stakes are rather high: your credibility is on the line. Good usage will enhance your credibility in readers'minds; bad usage can ruin it.

Although there are good, clarifying forces at work on the language, there are also bad, obscuring forces. And these bad forces tend to work most perniciously on people who are heedless of their language. It's hard to know such a thing, but this segment of society may well be on the rise.

This book could never reach those people.