What We’re Reading: Alphabetter Juice

Alphabetter Juice: Or, The Joy of Text by Roy Blount Jr. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011)

With today’s book review, let’s celebrate the pleasure, humor, and fun found in the English language with a fellow wordy nerd: Roy Blount Jr. Be warned, Blount keeps a brisk pace of wit and reference in his book, but he keeps it palatable with his palpably energetic and genuine voice. He’s a puppy off the leash, romping about, chewing on all the grammar and word-isms he can sniff out.

Scanning the good ol’ Oxford English Dictionary, Blount creates his own alphabetical guide to language. Instead of giving us definitions, however, his entries are passionate rants about each word’s quirky origin, usage, pronunciation, and sonicky value (an original Blount term that describes words that have both sonic and kinesthetic values). Sonicky words are those that you can feel in your mouth and body when saying them, and Blount doesn’t hide his love of them: “[…] give me writing that reeks of sound and motion,” he declares in the introduction. Some of his sonicky examples? Blurt, bubble, hunch … and the list goes on! Here’s the beginning of the entry for blurt:

blurt

OED’s first definition of this word is not current except in dialect, but you have to like the smack of it: “To emit the breath eruptively from the mouth to snort in sleep.” Presumably OED lists that definition first—although its first citation in print dates from 1611—because it is more closely linked to the body than the current, more abstract definition, “To utter abruptly . . . . to burst out with,” which is supported by an earlier (1573) citation in print. If a word has ever had a bodily meaning, that is presumably the one that it started with.

Some of the best attributes of this book are the playfulness and wonder that Blount imbibes into every entry. It’s a book that is easily read in small, laughter-filled bites, as well as something to be read all the way through. It’s also a book that includes so many self-referential cues that one could read it by flipping back and forth, meandering through each entry, then jumping mid-letter to another entry on a gleeful journey of exploration.

With each letter Blount explores, he starts with a humorous ramble about the letter itself. Here, for example, is the entertaining introduction to the letter K:

When, ironically enough, people are treating fuck as ineffable, they speak of “the f-word,” of “effing.” But a great deal of the word’s kick is in its final letter. Try saying, “What the fub?” or “Let’s go somewhere and fud” or “I will fuff you up” or “We fummed ourselves silly” or “Fur ’em if they can’t take a joke” or “When desperate housewives fuv around, they don’t fuv around.”

And in West Side Story, the delinquents did not sing, “Officer Ffrupfe, frupf you.”

Blount’s humor can be found in any of his twenty-three books, newspaper and magazine columns, or as a frequent guest on NPR’s radio show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. If you dig on this book, you can check out its predecessor, Alphabet Juice.

What authors get you chuckling with their humorous wonderment of language?