Red Herrings and White Elephants

I am also sceptical about books of this nature, because there is always a danger of the author (no matter their intentions) to reuse stories from previous authors that were poorly researched, or just plane wrong. This author has unfortunately fallen into this trap and even though this is an entertaining read, some of the explanations of the phrases covered in this book are wrong. For example, the Dodo did not become extinct due to their meat being eaten by hungry sailors. This theory was disproved by historians who did some proper research and read the journals of sailors who actually tried to eat Dodo meat where it was described as being of bad taste and tough. This is not the only error and even when the author does give multiple examples of the possible sources for an expression, I found it difficult to believe what I was reading because of the aforementioned errors. One of these days, books such as this will be researched thoroughly before being published.