Faux Pas: A No-nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases

FAUX PAS? A NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO WORDS AND PHRASES FROM OTHER LANGUAGES will reach many casual readers as well as English language library holdings, offering an approachable and even fun set of insights into hundreds of phrases readers may want to use in their writings. An A-Z listing of such words and phrases offers definitions, examples, and comments on expressions and relationships between words.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Great book, and an important one in this global village we now live in. One quibble from the American side of the Pond. Most of the context statements are from British papers, and some of the references are hard to understand for us Yankees. Case in point: Gooden cites a piece from the Guardian newspaper in the UK for the Japanese term "hara kiri" (Japanese ritual suicide), and the sentence from the UK paper goes: "Politically, any school remaining bog standard nowawdays in committing hara-kiri." So what does bog standard mean? We need another book guide to Britishisms! In the meantime, this book is no faux pas at all, but a darn good one.