Christine Ammer acknowledges in the preface to this second edition of her dictionary of clichés that it may seem oxymoronic for her to speak of updating a dictionary of clichés by adding new clichés. But of course every cliché is new at some blurry point along a time line, just as others gradually fall out of favor. Thus, as a linguist whose concern is current usage, Ammer has not only added new ones (new in the sense of having recently become established as clichés) but she has culled and discarded many older clichés ch as alas and alack and blot one's copybook at appeared in the first edition but that are rarely seen or heard nowadays. Taking the long view of the historian, Ammer regards a collection such as hers as giving form to the particularity of an era's attitude. A pointed example is drawn from the testimony of a young soldier pressed by her comrades to participate in harassment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her response, when agreeing to join in, was OK. Whatever. This example, along with several others, appears in the entry for whatever, which Ammer says is one of the most recent additions to clichédom, noting, too, that it is used very loosely. Her own definition any case; anything goes; as you wish certainly adequate, though it hardly accounts for the word being sometimes irksome, and even incendiary, as well as nonchalant. In this connection, she adduces the actor Russell Crowe's assault on a hotel clerk who uttered the word with a greater measure of disrespect than Crowe thought appropriate. (It's an absolute delight to find such matters brought up in discussing meaning and usage.) The thoroughness of this entry is typical of the whole, and the same thoroughness may be found in the indexing, which permits both phrasal and keyword searches. Recommended for all libraries wanting to keep their collection of English-language resources current.