Wastrel’s Reviews > "Reader's Digest" Illustrated Dictionary of Essential Knowledge: Information That Everyone Needs to Know > Status Update

The first section is on words and language. It's an odd mirepoix of basic linguistic terms (noun, case, direct object, determiner, etc), terms relating to writing (cuneiform, diacritical mark, etc), idioms (acid test, eating humble pie, cloud-cuckoo-land, etc), proverbs (don't look a gift horse in the mouth, etc), and words and phrases from other languages (de rigueur, deus ex machina, etc).

Each entry is anywhere from one sentence to one short paragraph, giving a quick definition, and in the case of the idioms a little history (cloud-cuckoo-land is from Aristophanes, for instance).

As a relatively educated person, I was familiar with almost all the terms. The little insights on the origins of expressions, however, were interesting - I didn't know, for example, that "stealing my thunder" was originally what John Dennis accused a certain William Shakespeare of (when the latter's 'Macbeth' reused the thunder-machine invented by the former for his own plays) - and I on some level knew but wasn't really mindful of the fact that the practice of fraudulent piglet selling has given us not one but three idioms ('pig in a poke', 'sold a pup' and 'cat out of the bag').

It's interesting to me that although the handful of Latin expressions explained here are all about as popular as they used to be, several of the French expressions are no longer current - one rarely hears of things being 'de trop' or 'comme il faut' nowadays, reflecting the precipitous decline of French as a language of prestige in England (think of how Del Boy attempts French words now and then and gets them wrong - but these days, the equivalent character wouldn't even try). And instead of 'chacun a son gout', I'd say 'de gustibus non disputandum est' (the book also suggests Terence's "quot homines, tot sententiae").

The two essential terms I'm not familiar with - I'm vaguely conscious of both, but wouldn't know what they meant out of context - were:

"Aunt Sally": a scapegoat or whipping boy; originally a carved head on a stick that fairgoers threw things at;

"Mrs Grundy": essentially a fictional 18th century Mary Whitehouse, from Speed the Plough.

Oh, and:

"Periodic sentence" - a complex sentence in which the main clause appears at the end. No, I don't know what that was important enough to include, but...

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It's a weird little section, to be honest. Much of it would indeed form a useful little booklet for children or lower-class individuals who wanted to understand what people were talking about at dinner parties. However, there's a punch of linguistic and rhetorical terms that are way beyond that level: while one could argue that knowing phrases and words like "crossing the Rubicon" or "on tenterhooks" or "pace" or "tête-à-tête" is useful for conversing in some sort of 'civilised society', I don't think anyone other than a professor of classical rhetoric at a symposium is really urgently going to need to be able to use "zeugma" in a conversation.


And of course, 30 pages of random words and phrases means it's all completely arbitrary - while most of the idioms are useful ones to know, you could find another five or six equally useful idioms omitted for every one included.