Alphabet Juice - Tapa dura

""Alphabet Juice" is pure Roy Blount Jr. amusing, bemusing, and smart as hell." -"Fortune " """Gracefully erudite and joyous." -Katherine A. Powers, "The ""Boston"" Globe" "If everybody's first English teacher were Roy Blount Jr., we might still be trillions in debt, but we would be so deeply in love with words and their magic that we'd hardly notice." -"The Dallas Morning News" "If your eyes have only skimmed over the long subtitle of "Alphabet Juice" and just vaguely registered that the book has something to do with words, please go back and read the entire subtitle again, slowly. This time listen to the syncopation of the clauses, as well as the alliterative music of the p's and t's, then note the juxtaposition of high and low style ('combinations thereof,' 'innards'), the punchy yet unexpected nouns ('gists,' 'pips'), that touch of genteel sexu

Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath? Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can't get over his ABCs. In "Alphabet Juice", he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is 'over the counter.' Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced "Blount's Glossographia", the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This "Blount's Glossographia" takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is "arbitrary." Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of 'alligator arm'), and especially from the author's own wide-ranging experience, "Alphabet Juice" derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.