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

by Philip Gooden

Book Overview

Have you ever been embarassed by the bons mots that some people toss casually into conversation, or wished that you had a clever retort? "Faux Pas offers insight into hundreds of these phrases that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802714730
• ISBN13: 9780802714732
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Walker & Company
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An approachable and even fun set of insights

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

Learning foreign words has never been so much fun!

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.