Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins

The authors are Glycemic Index researchers and thus have an ax to grind. I found this book to be very repetitious and in many places I felt that I was being talked down to. The Glycemic Index tables seem to be pretty worthless since different researchers get wildly different values and the results are often based on tests of no more than 5-10 people. All of the information in this book is available free on the internet. No matter what claim is made about nutrition, you can almost always find a diametrically opposed viewpoint. The main advice in this book boils down to eat a varied diet and avoid too much junk food and saturated fats. Hardly worth over 300 pages let alone a whole slew of books.

After I began reading this book and a couple of chapters later, my brain felt like it weighed 10 additional pounds! Getting through all the medical definitions (to wit, I have to admit some of it went right over my head) the book actually made sense. In fact, you can eat more foods if you calculate the sugar (glucose) base rating of 100 for all the foods listed in the book. Can you believe it...you can eat pasta, peanuts and even ice cream. Moderation helps! Combining foods together...high GI and low GI foods balance out the days count. The book lists many foods to eat, giving them a rating of whether they are high or low in the GI value. The only drawback I found is there are not enought menus or recipes. If you like mussels (YUK...I don't) you will enjoy having those recipes. Ok, author Jennie Brand-Miller, if you will put together a book containing only recipes a body can stomach...I will be the first in line to purchase one of them. The authors of this book have hit the nail on the head and so far, since following the advice, I have lost four pounds. Buy this book, it is eye opening about controlling blood sugar for diabetes patients and an overall good way for those only wishing to lose a few pounds to feel better. Kudos, Jennie Brand-Miller, you've written a great book.

I owned an earlier edition of this book and lost track of it some 30 years ago. I've been haunting bookstores for it ever since, but (duh) it only just occurred to me to search Amazon. Others are right, it's really not a reference book. It is simply an endlessly entertaining trove of interesting trivia about the source of our idioms.

Just a short comment: I own several reference books on phrase etymology. This is the best of the bunch.

I much prefered The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson. The Morris book seemed very random, while the work by Hendrickson seemed more in-depth.