Irina Levontina is a well-known linguist, leading researcher at the Russian Language Institute named after V.V. Vinogradova RAS, author of dictionaries and brilliant articles, popularizer of linguistics, specialist in forensic linguistic expertise, columnist for the newspaper Troitsky Variant - Science. And for 20 years she has been writing funny and vivid essays about changes in the Russian language, about new words and unusual grammatical constructions, about the speech of representatives of different generations and social strata, about the sayings of politicians and advertising "pearls." These essays were included in the books "Russian with a Dictionary" (2010, 2016) and "What are we talking about" (2016). Over the years, new stories have been added to them. This is how the book "Honest Word" turned out - a fascinating chronicle that covers the period from the 90s of the twentieth century to 2020 and convincingly proves that language, according to the author, is inseparable from life: "Our life is saturated with language - and it is dissolved in it."