by Roy Blount Jr. (Author)
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.
Author Biography
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-one previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.
Number of Pages: 304
Dimensions: 0.8 x 8.9 x 5.9 IN
Publication Date: May 08, 2012
