Alphabetter Juice
or, The Joy of Text
ISBN10: 0374533377
ISBN13: 9780374533373
Trade Paperback
304 Pages
$20.00
CA$22.00
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. 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.
Reviews
Praise for Alphabetter Juice
"A bighearted, zesty love letter."—The Seattle Times
"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
"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
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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...