Reviews for Alphabetter juice : or, the joy of text
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
In a follow-up toAlphabet Juice(2008), the author expands his personalized dictionary.Blount (Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made, 2010, etc.) is a classic American humorist in the company of H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Andy Rooney and Garrison Keillor. He is also a regular panelist on NPR's comic quiz show,Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!and consultant to theAmerican Heritage Dictionary. These biographical elements begin to provide a glimpse of the kind of writing readers will encounter inthis text: comic, intelligent, political, insightful and often absurd explorations of words as various as "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "decapitate." As with previous investigations of language, Blount shows he is a master at blending folksy humor with word play and etymological analysis. His reflections and analyses are witty, funny and unaffected, and his political humor can be sharp. Imagine a collaboration between Normal Rockwell, Groucho Marx and Daniel Webster, and you begin to have a picture of Blount here. If this comparison of sensibilities screams old fashioned, it's true, but only partly, as many of Blount's entries deal with current technologies and trends. In one instance, under the entry for "first sentence," he mocks the opening of Karl Rove's memoir with characteristically clever sarcasm. However, "folksy" is definitely apropos in describing Blount's comedy, or maybe even the more recent "old school"the humor recalls a time when comedy was less crass and offensive, say in Andy Griffith's Mayberry. A word like "fuck," for instance, is sanitized and imbedded in an entry for "gollywaddles."Read in small doses, a humorous and insightful panoply of word play, political humor and linguistic inquiry.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Lamenting critics of finicky language users, humorist Blount declares that when it comes to language, he intends to finick until the day he dies. And finick he does, with joy and curiosity and a great appreciation for words. In this follow-up to Alphabet Juice (2008), Blount contends that letters and sounds are not arbitrary, as some linguists claim, but are connected to our senses. Savoring the juiciness of some words that connect to our senses of sight and sound, Blount introduces the concept of sonicky, the satisfying or curious sounds of words. His collection is a discourse on oddities of origin, meaning, and pronunciation. His sources are as venerated as the Oxford English Dictionary, as contemporary as urbandictionary.com and YouTube, and as eclectic as his own tastes and experiences. 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. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Well-known humorist and library panelist Roy Blount Jr. follows up Alphabet Juice (2008) with another entertaining look at language, which will be supported by an author tour and a national advertising campaign.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Publishers Weekly
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The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmudgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. Leafing through the Oxford English Dictionary and other respectable sources, Blount compiles his own facetious lexicon of terms that pique his interest and prod him into a ramble. "Sonicky" words always get high marks for 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-Francois 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 its shambling grace. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
