
A Heaping Helping of Letters, Words, Gists, and Energies from a Beloved
Humorist Roy Blount Jr. has made his living using words in every medium,
print or electronic, except greeting cards. After his twenty-first
book,
Alphabet Juice (2008), it finally seemed he’d gotten over
his ABC’s. But a single glass of Juice could never contain the
etymological goulash that always simmers on the back burner of Blount’s
mind. Thus,
Alphabetter Juice, a second helping of Blount’s
dexterous wordplay and linguistic legerdemain. Rather than proper
English, Blount prescribes an “over-the-counter” mélange of a language,
unearthing a slew of factoids, fripperies, and flabbergasting phenomena
that will change the way you speak—or misspeak. Blount rejects the
standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their
meanings is “arbitrary.” As he tells it, the look and sound of our words
is pinned crucially to their “definitions”—whatever those are. From
sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency,
at whisk) and as new as urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has
contributed the number-one definition of “alligator arm”), and
especially from the author’s own wide-ranging experience, the freshly
squeezed
Alphabetter Juice derives a natural take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other. Drink up. (Nice
cap, Roy.)