“Why Do We Say It? The Stories Behind the Words, Expressions and Cliches We Use”, by Castle Books

286 pages, Castle Books, ISBN-13: 978-1555210106

Say, do you think that Castle Books knew they misspelled “clichés” when they printed Why Do We Say It? The Stories Behind the Words, Expressions and Cliches We Use? Guess not. Anyhoo…knowing the background story behind idioms, expressions and colloquialisms can be very fun and entertaining; it can also help you to use the expressions better or in interesting ways. Alas, this book has not been helpful to me in any of these things and is not to be trusted as an authoritative source for any given information. I have a collection of several other books whose purpose is to explain word and phrase origins and all of the respectable ones warrant, with admirable frequency, that the origin of such-and-such phrase is unknown or in dispute. Often multiple possible etymologies are given as possibilities.

This book, by contrast, never questions its own authority; it just hands down decrees on phrase origins – some of which I cross-checked against other sources in my collection and found contradictory evidence, or reports that the explanation given here had been discredited long ago. Even more alarmingly, this source lists no sources (hell, according to this, there isn’t even an author or an editor); no prefatory or post-script explanation of how this collection came to be; no credits, acknowledgments or history of printing. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. From the sheer number of entries that had, by the time of this printing – 1985, reissued in 2009 – completely disappeared from common speech, one must assume that the text was originally published decades previously, had fallen into public domain and was reprinted for no other reason than to make a quick buck.