Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text

by Roy Blount Jr.

Overview

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists

No man of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from adhominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better.

This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com?

Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative.

As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429922784
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	305
File size:	578 KB

About the Author

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-one previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States. 

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders. 

In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.” 

Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, theAtlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Alphabetter Juice

2JGw/OX
ELSIE: What’s that, Daddy?
FATHER: A cow.
ELSIE: Why?
 —from a 1906 issue of Punch, quoted by Ernest Weekley as an epigraph to his book An Etymology of Modern English
 
 When we reflect that “sentence” means, literally, “a way of thinking” (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure are not merely grammatical or merely academic—not negligible in any sense. A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought, a thought that impresses its sense not just on our understanding, but on our hearing, our sense of rhythm and proportion. It is a pattern of felt sense.
 —Wendell Berry, “Standing by Words”
 
 Captain Smith … , happening to be taken Prisoner among the Indians, had leave granted him to send a Message to the Governor of the English Fort in James Town, about his Ransome; the Messenger being an Indian, was surpriz’d, when he came to the Governor, … for that the Governor could tell him all his Errand before he spoke one Word of it to him, and that he only had given him a piece of Paper: After which, when they let him know that the Paper which he had given the Governor had told him all the Business, then … Capt. Smith was a Deity and to be Worshipp’d, for that he had Power to make the Paper Speak.
 —Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Original of Literature, 1726Copyright © 2011 by Roy Blount Jr.

Editorial Reviews

The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmudgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. Leafing through the Oxford English Dictionary and other respectable sources, Blount compiles his own facetious lexicon of terms that pique his interest and prod him into a ramble. "Sonicky" words always get high marks for sheer auto-evocativeness— "‘splotch' explodes from the mouth and makes an unmissable mess of itself"—but any dubious etymology, quaint and off-color usage, or over-reaching lexicographer's dictat is liable to get him going. Then he's off into historical digressions ("not until 1598 did prick appear as an insult"), grammatical rants (you-all is not singular, Yank), miscellaneous peeves (Karl Rove's prose, people who think somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays), and, always, a shaggy-dog story he wants to tell. Such is the force of the author's free-associational logic that the entry on meta-narrative carries us straight through Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the postmodern to international news reports of a rash of hog- and possum-hurling misdemeanors in Mississippi. Blount's hilarious collection of riffs and raves adds up to a cantankerous ode to the English language in all its shambling grace. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Blount's selection of words is particularly 'sonicky' and is accompanied by amusing facts and anecdotes and crazy stories that show the peculiarities of etymology and definitions and the deep and abiding beauty of words. Writers and readers will love this book.” —Booklist

“The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmudgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. . . Blount's hilarious collection of riffs and raves adds up to a cantankerous ode to the English language in all its shambling grace.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

In a follow-up toAlphabet Juice(2008), the author expands his personalized dictionary.

Blount (Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made, 2010, etc.) is a classic American humorist in the company of H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Andy Rooney and Garrison Keillor. He is also a regular panelist on NPR's comic quiz show,Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!and consultant to theAmerican Heritage Dictionary. These biographical elements begin to provide a glimpse of the kind of writing readers will encounter inthis text: comic, intelligent, political, insightful and often absurd explorations of words as various as "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "decapitate." As with previous investigations of language, Blount shows he is a master at blending folksy humor with word play and etymological analysis. His reflections and analyses are witty, funny and unaffected, and his political humor can be sharp. Imagine a collaboration between Normal Rockwell, Groucho Marx and Daniel Webster, and you begin to have a picture of Blount here. If this comparison of sensibilities screams old fashioned, it's true, but only partly, as many of Blount's entries deal with current technologies and trends. In one instance, under the entry for "first sentence," he mocks the opening of Karl Rove's memoir with characteristically clever sarcasm. However, "folksy" is definitely apropos in describing Blount's comedy, or maybe even the more recent "old school"—the humor recalls a time when comedy was less crass and offensive, say in Andy Griffith's Mayberry. A word like "fuck," for instance, is sanitized and imbedded in an entry for "gollywaddles."

Read in small doses, a humorous and insightful panoply of word play, political humor and linguistic inquiry.

Kirkus Reviews