Over the past thirty years, thousands of people have shared their informal family sayings with Nigel Rees and asked whether anybody else knew of them.

With All Gong and No Dinner, Nigel Rees has produced both a fresh and an updated celebration of these domestic catchphrases, household words, rhymes, old wives' sayings, and proverbial pearls of wisdom. He has searched for the origins of hundreds of the conversation clippings which together illustrate all aspects of domestic life. Whether unique to their owners, or instantly recognizable, they reveal everything from how we talk about our relatives and neighbours to the 'nannyisms' embedded since childhood.

Organized thematically, these euphemisms, exclamations, put downs and vivid vignettes, take us all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom, via the bathroom and back again. They underscore both the warm truths and the perfect nonsense of everyday family life.

All gong and no dinner - meaning, of a person, that he is 'all talk and no action'. What you might say of a loud-mouthed person who is somewhat short on achievement. Current since the mid-20th century at least. 'So far, all we have had from the Government is "all gong and no dinner" - to use a phase that a constituent of mine used in a public meeting. In other words, the sound and the fury have been there but the delivery has been missing' - speaker at Welsh Grand Committee (Westminster) (2001). Texan variant: 'All hat and no cattle.'