Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Blount (Long Time Leaving) is a contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly, a regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! quiz show and a usage consultant to the American Heritage Dictionary. He displays his pleasure in words with his subtitle—The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; with Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory—as he dishes up an alphabetical array of verbal reverberations, weasel words and linguistic acrobatics from aardvark to zoology (Pronounced zo-ology. Not zoo-ology. Look at the letters. Count the o's). Along the way, he compares dictionaries, slings slang, digs for roots, posts ripostes and dotes on anecdotes. The format is nearly identical to Roy Copperud's still valuable but out-of-print A Dictionary of Usage and Style (1964). Blount's book is equally instructive and scholarly, but is also injected with a full dose of word play on steroids. Quotes, quips, euphemisms, rhymes and rhythms, literary references (Lo-lee-ta) and puns: The lowest form of wit, it used to be said, but that was before Ann Coulter. Throughout, the usage advice is sage and also fun, since the writer's own wild wit, while bent and Blount, is razor sharp. (Oct. 21)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda If your eyes have only skimmed over the long subtitle of Alphabet Juice and just vaguely registered that the book has something to do with words, please go back and read the entire subtitle again, slowly. This time listen to the syncopation of the clauses, as well as the alliterative music of the p's and t's, then note the juxtaposition of high and low style ("combinations thereof," "innards"), the punchy yet unexpected nouns ("gists," "pips"), that touch of genteel sexual innuendo ("secret parts"), and the concluding flourish of the gustatory. Like Roy Blount Jr. himself, his new book's subtitle neatly balances real learning with easy-loping charm. But then Blount isn't merely the ah-shucks Georgia boy he might sometimes seem; he's a Georgia boy who was a Phi Beta Kappa at Vanderbilt and has an M.A. in English from Harvard. Moreover, for the past 40 or so years he has supported himself by a versatile and distinctly pleasing way with words, having been successively (or even simultaneously) a sports reporter, essayist, cultural commentator, light versifier, occasional actor, novelist, lecturer, oral storyteller and anthologist (Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor). Though generally slotted as a humorist (in the down-home vein of Will Rogers and Garrison Keillor), Blount is still serious enough to be a longtime usage adviser to the American Heritage Dictionary, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a star of National Public Radio's quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me." And therein lies a mystery: Given all this energetic freelancing, how does the man somehow manage to sound -- in person and on the page -- as if he spent most of his time lounging on an old davenport, with a cold Abita Amber in his hand, watching football or basketball on TV? 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. Take a look at Alphabet Juice. To all appearances, it might be just one more tributary to the never-ending stream of books about language and proper usage. Haven't we already had our loosey-goosey grammar and diction excoriated by H.W. Fowler (Modern English Usage), Theodore Bernstein (The Careful Writer) and John Simon (Paradigms Lost)? Haven't scholars from W.W. Skeat and Eric Partridge to the latest editors of the Oxford English Dictionary unriddled the etymological mysteries behind our most common words? What makes this book by Roy Blount so special? Well, Blount, of course. You don't so much read Alphabet Juice as listen to it. The book may be printed, paginated and bound, but I'm guessing that some kind of microchip, probably embedded in the spine, funnels Blount's ingratiating, slightly disingenuous voice directly into your brain. A given entry -- "the f-word," "subjunctive," "menu-ese," "pizzazz" -- may start off with a scholarly account of a word or term's origin, with more than a casual glance at its Proto-Indo-European root, but before long Blount will soft-shoe his way into an anecdote, some comic verse, a bit of wordplay. Look up the phrase "honest broker." Here we learn that "the word broker stems from the Spanish alboroque, a ceremonial gift at the resolution of a business deal, which in turn is from the Arabic baraka, divine blessing. Barack Obama's first name comes (by way of his father, same name) from that word." All fascinating no doubt, but the true Blount wallop -- from out of left field -- comes in the next paragraph: "I am told that today a Wall Streeter no longer uses broker as the verb form, but instead endeavors to broke a security. One reason I'm not rich is that I am broker-phobic. I assume they are always trying to unload dreck on people like me and lining up something underhandedly predetermined for insiders: if it ain't fixed, don't broke it." The title Alphabet Juice derives from its author's contention that sound and sense are often strikingly related, that certain letters and combinations of letters possess a gut-level electricity, and that "through centuries of knockabout breeding and intimate contact with the human body" some words "have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth." A high-fiber word like "grunt" sounds right for what it means. Good diction thus tends to be sonicky, Blount's neologism for that "quality of a word whose sound doesn't imitate a sound, like boom or poof, but does somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish or vim." To write well, then, we need to use our tongue and ears, not only our mind and fingers. For example, Blount makes the case for the word "ain't" by imagining songs called "It Isn't Me, Babe" and "Amn't Misbehavin'." He goes on to say, sensibly, that "anyone attempting to pronounce amn't may attract a crowd of well-wishers admiring his or her pluck, but whatever other words the speaker surrounds it with will be lost." For the most part, though, Blount is no laissez-faire latitudinarian. He bristles at the wide-spread misuse of "hopefully" and our growing tendency to say "I" or "myself" instead of "me." Commenting on the rebarbative acronyms of the Internet (i.e., ROFL -- rolling on the floor with laughter), he writes, with a neat double-entendre: "A medium that requires such terms is not a happy medium." Blount even finds an occasion for brio in his definition of a colon: "an introductory gesture, on the order of 'and now I give you': not quite a ta-daaa." Like many writers, Blount is drawn to lists. Alphabet Juice includes his half-dozen favorite one-word sentences (including "Fuhgeddaboudit."), followed by some great sentences of two words ("Jesus wept.") and concluding with a few classic three-worders ("Call me Ishmael."). Several pages take up eccentric names in literature and life, noting the heavy-handed handles of Thomas Pynchon's characters -- Alonzo Meatman, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, the Reverend Lube Carnal -- and speculating about what James Fenimore Cooper was thinking when he decided to call his romantic hero Natty Bumppo. Blount points out that he has known people named LaMerle Tingle, Snake Grace and Love Beavers, and that "among many reasons New Orleans should not die is that the spokesman for the New Orleans Housing Authority, as of June 2006, was Adonis Exposé." While Blount loves the New York Times, the South and lively English, he loathes George Bush and notes that our president was the only man ever to leave New Orleans three hours before he had to. Sly digs at Bush and his disastrous policies and deceptions recur with welcome frequency throughout Alphabet Juice. For instance, "Pareidolia is 'seeing things.' Seeing, that is, what you want to see in ambiguous patterns or images. The Virgin Mary on a piece of toast (never, you notice, on a bagel), weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Blount dubs himself a "shade-tree lexicographer," which calls to mind Sunday afternoons tinkering with a dictionary instead of a timing belt or carburetor. Despite some pretty fancy etymologizing, Blount still comes across as a regular guy: "We know from the writings of Thales of Miletus (or more likely, as in my case, from encyclopedias) that the Greeks knew . . ." But when he wants to, he can deliver a quip or judgment as pointed as anything by a 17th-century French aphorist: "Reading from a monitor, instead of a book, is like playing videogame football instead of tossing a football around." Alphabet Juice, being arranged like a dictionary, is designed for browsing, for flipping through the pages, reading where you will, "without ever being sure you've read it all." Just don't miss the entries about Wilt Chamberlain, the evolution of "D'oh," the naughty but brilliant wordplay of Leonard Bernstein (see "transposition game"), the history of "okay," the last, unlikely words that Lincoln heard before he was shot (see the entry for "socket"), the origin of Goody Two-Shoes, the snappy examples of movie dialogue, the Samuel Goldwynisms ("Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined"), the Willie Nelson story under the entry "appreciate," and the anecdotes, such as the following, used to illustrate "Marriage, impact of word choice upon": "A woman once told me that she made a point of mispronouncing words in fine restaurants because she knew it drove her husband crazy. 'What's this gunnotchy?' she would ask the waiter, pointing to gnocchi on the menu. Once she even pronounced steak to rhyme with leak. Why? Because years earlier, in a snooty French eatery, her husband had expressed embarrassment over her pronunciation of huîtres, and she was still getting back at him." Back in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson could define a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge," but he obviously never foresaw the armed and dangerously funny Roy Blount Jr.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374103690
• ISBN-13: 978-0374103699
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #26,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, entertaining, and even educational, November 5, 2008

By	R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A joy for the word lover, November 16, 2008

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweeten l'eau, November 23, 2008

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.