BOOK REVIEW – A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi” by Chloe Rhodes

A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi”

• by Chloe Rhodes
• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Readers Digest (March 4, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1606520571
• ISBN-13: 978-1606520574

I already was reading when I entered school. Back then I was put into a combined first-second grade class. I remember my teacher instructing, “Do not read ahead.” I disregarded orders and finished the preprimers and primers in record time. I always enjoyed words. By high school I was into the great books, classics, and mysteries. Dame Agatha wrote stories of the manor house murders. I avidly read every one.

Poirot, Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne, and Harley Quin were all friends. The trouble is that every one of them peppered their language with foreign words, foreign word I did not understand. Point of interest: those foreign words were NOT in my English dictionary. (Of course, I looked.)

The emerging reader in me coped by sounding out words. I never understood at ten why applesauce was in the middle of a novel. Years later would I discover the word was applause. Only then the section on Huck’s funeral made sense. Still often as not I was left scratching my head, puzzling on what the author said. Context helped. Age and experience filled in the gaps. Schools taught spelling at the time. Vocabulary would have been a nice adjunct.

I just completed Readers Digest A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi” by Chloe Rhodes. Wish I had it back when I was teaching and doing my daily lesson plans. This book gives the origins of foreign words commonly used in English, their translations, their etymology, their history, and even illustrates their use with a sentence. I found the entries very interesting. I was surprised how many I already knew because of my high school Latin and German. I was not surprised about how many of them I mispronounced.

As a text a few of the words might be controversial/censored in places like California which banned Edgar Rice Burrows in public school libraries because Tarzan didn’t wear enough clothes. I smiled at the inclusion of tsunami remembering my nervousness after the sign I saw in Vancouver shortly after 2004′s world tragedy. I laughed at the Hawaiian ukulele’s analogy to jumping fleas. I awed at Gene Rodenbery’s cremated ashes making a trek across the skies on the space shuttle Columbia.

No hours required as minutes or even seconds will do. This book is fantastic for light reading. It could be a great reference book too.

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