A Certain "Je Ne Sais Quoi": The Origin of Foreign Words Used in English
A Reader's Digest Association paperback from the Blackboard Books series, small enough to keep near a desk and designed to look like the kind of reference book that used to be given as a graduation gift. Chloë Rhodes arranges borrowed words alphabetically—aficionado to zeitgeist—offering translations, approximate etymologies, and a timeline of how each term was naturalized into English. The entries are brief, the black-and-white illustrations are decorative rather than necessary, and the whole thing carries the faint instructional cheer of a book that wants you to feel smarter without much effort. The Blackboard binding is compact, the margins are generous, and the price suggests it was meant to be impulse-bought. Ideal reader: the person who uses schadenfreude in conversation and wants to know whether they are pronouncing it correctly.
