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56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging, entertaining, and even educational, November 5, 2008
ALPHABET JUICE is a potpourri of comments on words and the English language, arranged in alphabetically-ordered entries and presented with Blount's characteristic good humor. It is somewhat akin to books on the proper use of words and language, but it should not be pigeon-holed as simply a user's guide. While it does contain a fair measure of advice and commentary on usage (Blount is not particularly uptight, but he does have a prescriptive bent), it also has generous doses of etymology, word play, jokes, and personal experiences and anecdotes. It appears likely that Blount has been collecting material for this book over many years of his career as a writer and somewhat populist man-of-letters.
Blount does push one particular thesis in the book. Contrary to those scholars who hold that the relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary, Blount insists that the sound of many words "somehow sensuously evoke[s] the essence of the word." To characterize this quality, he coins the word "sonicky." A few miscellaneous examples (out of hundreds) of sonicky words from the book: "crunch," "gallop," "grunt," "mum," and "squelch." Blount: "If linguisticians can't hear any correspondence between sound and sense in those words, they aren't listening. Even when words aren't coined with sound and sense conjunctively in mind, the words that sound most like what they mean have a survival advantage." And throughout the book, Blount marshals plenty of evidence for this thesis.
But please don't get the idea that ALPHABET JUICE is some sort of high-brow, academic tome. To fully appreciate it, one certainly needs to be generally literate and to care about words and language, but one does not need to hold a graduate degree in English or in linguistics. Indeed, ALPHABET JUICE may put off many who do hold degrees in those fields.
To give you a better idea of the wide and eclectic range of the book, here are several of my favorite entries or discussions: Bushisms and Berraisms; book blurbs; "hopefully" (Blount convinces me that the common usage of "hopefully" as a sentence-modifying adverb is unacceptable, even execrable); French movies from the Fifties starring Brigitte Bardot; "nosism" (the delivering of one's opinions in the royal or editorial or corporate "we"); "what-if history"; and Wilt Chamberlain. There also is a modest dose of moralizing, much of it on the mark. For example: "Walt Whitman boasted of his 'barbaric yawp,' and good for him. Now America has got itself backed into the corner of claiming to be defending civilization, of all things. Not our strong suit."
By its very nature, ALPHABET JUICE does not readily lend itself to being read straight through, cover to cover. Because I feel that I should not review any book that I have not read in its entirety, I pushed myself to read ALPHABET JUICE cover to cover, though it took me two weeks of off-and-on reading. I sensed that the quality of the book began to decline a tad around the letter "Q", although that impression may well have been due in part to a certain measure of tedium. On the other hand, much that is of interest would be missed if one read only selected entries more or less at random. The best approach might be to read a letter a day. However it is read, to a literate reader ALPHABET JUICE should prove to be moderately engaging, entertaining, and educational.
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A joy for the word lover, November 16, 2008
One of my great pleasures is listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" on NPR each week. Many of the panelists and guests are very clever and funny, but Roy Blount Jr. adds a deep gravitas to his humorous contributions. Much of that gravitas comes from his deep baritone with its foundation of Georgian drawl, over lain with vowels sometimes clipped off with a sharp Boston twang.
I wonder if listening to himself led Blount to his theory of "sonicky", that the sound of a word often evokes its meaning. Search on his made up word in Amazon's extremely generous extracts and see if you don't agree; "chunky" and "wonky" are two excellent examples, but the book contains many others.
Blount encourages the reader to expand on his discoveries. He identifies "it" as the ultimate skinny two letter word. But what about the fattest two letter word? I went through my Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and came up with twenty or so legitimate candidates. I rejected "a" words: "a" is wide enough and the hanging edges are a bit evocative of rolls of fat, and "u" was wide but too empty. Somehow the "o" was "fuller". I struggled a bit between "om" and "ow" before settling on "om"; those valleys in "w" were just not fat enough, in either appearance or when facing the sonicky test.
This is a book to read and reflect on; Blount quotes so many different sources, that he encourages the reader to search outside the book. I found the online Oxford English Dictionary and Google Books invaluable sources of enhancing information. Example: Blount traces "murder your darlings" -- i.e. avoid flowery writing to On the Art of Writing by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch. I didn't have a copy lying around in my library but it was a joy to read the injunction in context and to skim through the full edition of that excellent study thanks to Google Books.
Blount is great fun to listen to -- according to his website, this book is available as an audiobook although Amazon doesn't seem to have it. It is worth reviewing some of his other writings, regularly in "The Atlantic" and monthly in "Gone Off Up North" in "The Oxford American." I especially enjoyed About Three Bricks Shy: And The Load Filled Up, the best sports [and football] book I've ever read.
If you love words and the sounds of words, this book will prove to be a treasure for you.
Robert C. Ross 2008
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweeten l'eau, November 23, 2008
Juice is apt as this book squizzles around the mouth. Could Roy Blount Jr. write a sequel? Not fast enough.
"Alphabet Juice" reaches readers on two levels, I would guess. There are the appreciative mavens of wordom (worddom....word-dom?) who will chuckle and te-hee but the hardcore wordies (of the latter am I) revel in this kind of thing. Ya gotta give Blount credit when, regarding bow-wow, he can't imagine a dog forming a "b". And the last entry on "hip", referring to the guy who had a double hip operation, is one of his best.
Much of the reader's particular interest in this book might be found in how Blount exposes words knowing we may see them differently. I loved "wrought". He dwells on the "ugh" of the word while I wondered how many words in our language could add a letter to both the beginning and the end of "rough" and still come up with a word. The author is a good teacher in that he reminds us of jots and tittles but also adds "clitic" without fear of an "r"-rating.
This is a book to be savored. The narrative sometimes wanders but keep your eyes peeled for the moments when he is spot-on. This is the best book on language to come out in years and I highly recommend it.
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