It is an amusing book, but I cannot think of any situation in which it would be useful.
"Thousands of bizarre origins, unexpected connections, and fascinating facts about English's best expressions." This book has an alphabetic list of English phrases with a one-sentence comment on each.
Phraseology is categorized as a reference book. You cannot use it for reference. It is not sufficiently exhaustive to have something on every expressions or even all the expressions used in its explanation of other expressions. It has no citations, footnotes, or references, so while you and I may trust Ms. Kipfer, we have no evidence that she did not just make all these up.
The main problem with using it as a reference book, or for anything else, is its randomness. Sometimes it tells you what the phrase means. Sometimes it tells you its origin. Sometimes it explains a connection to something else. Only explaining what it means is likely to be useful, and you probably have better sources for that already (you are on the internet right now).
The random tidbits are only useful if you already know enough to fit them in. One factoid in isolation is useless. If you know enough to use this book, you know enough not to need this book.
A few examples:
"zoot suit is a rhyming formation on suit" : Okay, but what is a zoot suit? Luckily, I already know, but assuming I don't: what sets it apart from other suits? Is it literally a suit or is that just a metaphorical expression? Does the widths of the lapels matter? Why were there riots about them? No, it is just a rhyming formation. (Also, the lack of punctuation and capitalization is in the original, for everything except proper nouns.)
"the bread slots in a toaster are called toast wells" : Potentially useful, but how would you ever come upon this unless you were just reading through the book sequentially? It is not as though you will find an out-of-context reference to "toast wells," and if you did, you would probably have a dictionary that would answer that question as easily.
"a Gibson girl (1901), a woman considered stylish in the late 1890s to early 1900s, was named for Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944), U.S. artist and illustrator, whose main model was his wife, Irene Langhorne" : I have no idea what a Gibson girl is. I now know when they were popular and who they are named after, but I could not point to a Gibson girl on the street. This is one of those isolated facts that is useless unless you already know what the term means, and if you already know what it means, why would you look it up in hopes that this book's one sentence is something new rather than something you already know?
"to eye-bite is to bewitch with a malign influence whatever the eye glances upon" : This is good. This is also a definition, and I have access to many dictionaries.
This book might serve as idle entertainment for intellectuals who want to feel smug about how good their vocabularies are. Now, don't knock intellectual masturbation if you have never tried it, but I cannot recommend a book on that basis.
Amazon link
0 comments:
Post a Comment