Roy Blount Jr.

Alphabetter Juice or the Joy of Text
		--The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmdgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. Leafing through the Oxford English Dictionary and other respectable sources, Blount compiles his own lexicon of terms that pique his interest and prod him into a ramble. 'Sonicky' words always get high marksfor sheer auto-evocativeness-- 'splotch 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 ist shambling grace. -- Publishers Weekly --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

Alphabetter Juice or the Joy of Text

--The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmdgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. Leafing through the Oxford English Dictionary and other respectable sources, Blount compiles his own lexicon of terms that pique his interest and prod him into a ramble. 'Sonicky' words always get high marksfor sheer auto-evocativeness-- 'splotch 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 ist shambling grace. -- Publishers Weekly

--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

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