WHAT A WORD!A. P. HerbertDoubleday, Doran ($2).
Since the days when Don Quixote went out and charged a windmill many a man has gone crusading for his crotchets. In the pages of London's augustly humorous Punch, Alan Patrick Herbert has for years been waging a single-handed combat against four humorless ogres: Prohibition, the Divorce Law, Commercializing the Thames, Bad English. Last week, in What a Word!, he collected his scattered witticisms against the murderers of His Majesty's English, proclaimed a jehad: "I declare a new and ruthless Word War; and I invite all lovers of good words to buckle on their dictionaries...