How to Sound Smart: A Quick and Witty Guide

I thumbed through this at a coffee bar in a bookstore, and I just had to buy it. "Infotainment" is my favorite kind of read! If you're not the kind of reader who can happily while away an hour or two reading the dictionary, feel free to deduct as many stars as you wish! I, myself, just loved it.

Once in a while or so, I like to buy books which may, at first glance, appear to be trivia & yet studded with interesting & entertaining stuff. This is one of those books that I have encountered while browsing through some of my favourite used bookstores. From years of personal experience, I often noted that such books provide me with useful learning points. In fact, many of the trivia questions in this particular book gave me some valuable insights into how to rack the human mind. Let me explain. At the end of my creativity workshops for professional adults ( & even for kids & teens), I often like to conduct a ten-minute 'Rack Your Brains' session, during which participants have only 30 seconds to answer each of thirteen hand-picked questions, comprising mostly puzzles, teasers, trivia, etc. My purpose of the exercise is to sum up what I called 'understanding cognitive traps & pattern interrupts'. On the whole, I find this book to be a reasonably good companion to 'Instant Genius" (which I have reviewed earlier) by Tanya Slover.

hubris, quid pro quo, id est, red diaper baby . . . .All very common phrases in the English language, but many people do not know exactly what they mean. This book will correct those deficiencies. If you graduated from a non-Kansas High School, you will have heard most of the words and references in this book, although you may not know what they mean. There's enough here that even the most educated individual is sure to learn a few things.

This book defines about about 250 phrases, many Latin, along with correct pronounciation and examples. I can't imagine anyone actually reading this book cover-to-cover and learning many of the phrases, but you might learn more if you do a page-a-day type thing. For the most part, anyone who uses more than a few of the phrases in this book in daily conversation would look like a pompous jerk, but it's still good to know the definition of the phrases.