Instead of saying sh*t or damn, Russians often say blin, which means “pancake.” You drop your textbooks on the floor: pancake. A Russian New Yorker named Margarita (after the Margarita in The Master and Margarita) told me her university professor described the word pancake as “word garbage” and asked her students to pay a five-ruble fine every time they said pancake in class. I like that, although I disagree with Margarita’s professor on what constitutes word trash. The word trash in this book has more in common with sh*t than it does with pancakes. Word trash deflects, masks, or disconnects us from the truth and each other: It’s empty filler words, hyperbole, ego juice, unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, abstractions, false necessities, shoulds, nonspecifics, and insult metaphors.