Red Herrings and White Elephants - Albert Jack > Reviews (1)

"Red Herrings and White Elephants: the origins of the phrases we use everyday".

The title is self-explanatory, really.

Have you ever wondered where some phrases come from? I do. I'm in regular contact with people all over the world, and I always find their colloquial expressions interesting. However, many people don't really know the origins of these phrases, as I found out when questioning my foreign chums.

Albert Jack explores a lot of the weird phrases we use in everyday life and attempts to pinpoint their origins. Over the course of around two hundred and fifty pages, the author attempts to categorise these phrases based on their origins. You might then find that certain expressions are nautical based, from literature, from the Greeks and Romans amongst others. There are around seventeen categories in all.

'Bob's your uncle', for example, is a phrase with a political origin, meaning to reach a satisfactory conclusion through a small/minimum amount of effort. To quote the book: "[The phrase] came into use following the appointment in the 1890s of Arthur Balfour to Secretary of State for Ireland. Balfour was a surprise - few thought he was qualified. It became known he was the nephew of British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil and people said with a wink that anything was possible if Robert was your uncle."

This is a typical example of an explanation of the phrases that Albert Jack explains. Each phrase is succinctly explained with little or no padding - it's a simple case of then , and that's it. This means that the book tends to be quite dry with only one or two examples of the author's personality appearing. As I was quite interested in the subject matter, this wasn't an issue though and it's certainly not as dry as some of the I.T. related books I'm used to reading. There's no flow to the book - all it is, is a series of entries of entries. This makes it easy to pick up and read when you want, irrespective of whether you have thirty seconds or thirty minutes to yourself.

I really enjoyed this. As I've already said, I was interested in the subject matter, so it didn't take me too long to get through the entire book. The dictionary/encyclopedia format to the book means that it's ideal for dipping in and out of and probably not for prolonged periods of reading. If you're interested in the origins of some of the phrases we use today (and I found the origins of "berk" to be particularly funny), and don't mind the reference format then I think this is an interesting book. It's already been passed to my sister and brother-in-law who have also given this a 'thumbs up'. Of course, the downside to reading this is that I now tell people where their phrases come from and they've all realised that I am a dreadful bore.

List price: £9.99
Amazon UK Price: £6.99
Hardback
ISBN: 1843581299