Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book should carry a label saying "Warning - don't assume that any of this is true". In the foreword the author portrays himself as being inspired to write it when sitting in an olde English pub musing on the oddness of English phrases. It reads as though it had been researched in a pub as well; many of the "origins" given are exactly the kind of thing you'd be told by some wiseacre leaning up against the bar. To disprove some of them, such as "keeping danger at bay" and "on the fiddle", wouldn't even take a reference library; you'd only need to look up the words in a good dictionary. One or two of them - such as "dead ringer" - come directly from a famous internet spoof, "Life in the 1500s". The book is sloppy in every way. Regardless of whether the explanation of a phrase's origin is broadly correct or not, many of the supporting "facts" are wrong; such as the statements that a pig's ear "cannot be eaten or used in any way" - an assertion that would startle peasant cooks from all over Europe - and that pigs are "sacred to Hindus" (!) It's very odd that some of the "explanations" of phrases in this book don't actually explain them at all. The images evoked by phrases like "flogging a dead horse" or "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" exactly match what we mean when we say them; the stories in "Red Herrings and White Elephants" actually make much less sense. And yet people seem to prefer the far-fetched stories. Strange.