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Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, by Roy Blount
Free PDF Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, by Roy Blount
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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 ad hominy 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.
- Sales Rank: #1079340 in Books
- Published on: 2011-05-10
- Released on: 2011-05-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.33" h x 1.00" w x 6.37" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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- " âÇÿsplotch' 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)
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From Booklist
Lamenting critics of finicky language users, humorist Blount declares that when it comes to language, he intends to �finick� until the day he dies. And finick he does, with joy and curiosity and a great appreciation for words. In this follow-up to Alphabet Juice (2008), Blount contends that letters and sounds are not arbitrary, as some linguists claim, but are connected to our senses. Savoring the juiciness of some words that connect to our senses of sight and sound, Blount introduces the concept of �sonicky,� the satisfying or curious sounds of words. His collection is a discourse on oddities of origin, meaning, and pronunciation. His sources are as venerated as the Oxford English Dictionary, as contemporary as urbandictionary.com and YouTube, and as eclectic as his own tastes and experiences. 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. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Well-known humorist and library panelist Roy Blount Jr. follows up Alphabet Juice (2008) with another entertaining look at language, which will be supported by an author tour and a national advertising campaign. --Vanessa Bush
Review
"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)
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Tangy and tasty, but on the pulpy side
By Jean E. Pouliot
Lovers of word origins are sure to flock to Roy Blount Jr.'s "Alphabetter Juice" for a reinjection of Blount's trademark folksy erudition. The book is an alphabetical listing of essays on the origins and uses of words and phrases (flies, gillie, institutional memory, etc.) spiced with frequent Blount tangents. It's fascinating reading, mostly at the edge of comprehensibility. Blount seems hell bent on pounding into the reader's head his favorite concept of "sonicky" words. Sonicky words (unlike the closely-related onomatopoeia) are those whose pronunciation bears some resemblance to the meaning of the word. Take "push" and "pull." Push starts out with a plosive "P" sound that mimics the instant of propulsion, while the soft, lingering "sh" follows the poor devil's flight into the void. Pull, on the other hand, while starting with the same instant of the action's beginning, uses the long "l" sound to draws the word to an indefinite end. I found the concept of sonicky words interesting, though I'm not convinced that words are created this way. Wouldn't various languages have sonickiness that draws similar-sounding words for the same concept? Yet they don't. Maybe sonicky words are sonicky because we tend to pronounce them according the their meaning? Like the unconsciously long draw of "puuuuulllllll",
Which brings me to others reason for the lost star.
For all the wonderful material in the book (and there is a ton of it!) Blount sometimes can't seem to get out of his own head. More than a few of the entries were so loaded with clever wordplay and inscrutable allusions as to be incomprehensible. (What is it with his obsession with Frisian?) It's almost as though Blount was writing an ode to his own braininess, forgetting to let the reader in on the story as well. And his etymologies tended to be hard to follow, and hence unconvincing.
Best about the book were Blount's forays into personal anecdote. He is clearly a well-read and smart fellow. His asides - whether on Chesterton's verse, or salmon fishing in Iceland with a local girl, or pig-tossing in Mississippi - were as entertaining and lucid as parts of the rest of the book were not.
Lots of carping about a 4-star book, no? But there you have it. Roy Blount is a brilliant writer whose writing occasionally chases its own tail into the antechamber of oblivion. Squeeze as much out of "Alphabetter Juice" as you can, but don't worry if you run into some dark, soft spots.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Folksy and funny
By K.M. Weiland, Author of Historical and Speculative Fiction
I wasn't sure what I was getting in this book. Mostly, I bought it just because it was a buck fifty and pushed me over the Free Super Shipper Savings on Amazon. An annotated dictionary about the history of words. As a word nut, that sounded attractive. But it could very easily have ended being super tedious.
Not so. Not so at all. This book is a charmer from start to finish. Folksy, funny, self-indulgent in all the best ways, and downright educative. It's not juicy, so much as chewy - in a salty, lip-smacking, can't-eat-just-one sort of way.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Educational and Entertaining
By P. Miller
This title grabbed my eye on the new books shelf at the local public library, and I've laughed aloud more in the past two days reading it than in the past several months combined. It is both educational and entertaining. I'm ordering a copy as birthday gift for my son, who is an English major and has of late taken to referring to himself as "a scholar." It's the ideal busy thinking man's bathroom book, filled with etymologies and definitions that are brief, informative, and humorous.
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