Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

True to its engaging title, which is why I wanted to read it, Roy Blount's Alphabet Juice is indeed full of examples of usage "foul and savory." I like it because I agree so often with what he says about misused and overused words like awesome, just, hopefully, literally, incredible--as well as ungrammatical oral uses of myself, for you and I, and careless contructions with apostrophies seen in print. It's a fine book for people who value precision in speaking and writing. Carol Cover, Northfield MN

If you are interested in Roy Blount Jr. you may like this book. If you are interested in modern English usage,witty excursions into etymology, comic commentary on the ways of words, "the weave of word-craft," to borrow from the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, then you may want your money back. This ramble through the alphabet is really about Blount Jr., his opinions, his cronies, and his single idea, repeated and repeated and repeated on every page: the relationship between word and meaning is not arbitrary but organic, "sonicky," as he merrily puts it, for he is a humorist. But the humor with which all this is delivered is a tiresome variation from lame to forced to silly and adolescent, as when he ends paragraphs with: "oh, never mind"--to which the reader is expected to chortle in admiration. Junior Blount has watched far too much television. For me the best examples of mature wit in the scrutiny of language remain Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and H.L. Mencken's "The American Language."(And to think that Mencken was a journalist by trade... But there was more wit in Mencken's cigar than in 364 pages of Blount Jr.) Blount Jr. boasts of his contributions to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition. I am glad I still have the first edition, in which one finds among the panel contributors Cleveland Amory, Isaac Asimov, Russell Baker, Jacques Barzun, Morton Bloomfield, John Ciardi--no Junior Blount. Those were the days....

Mr. Blount's style is vigorous and entertaining, if opinionated and shallow. In short it offers the kind of sloppy commentary one often hears on NPR. Because of his archness, I have no idea how to appraise his opinions, for example about the Indo-European origins of English. Nonetheless, I enjoy glancing at the book in idle moments. Some of his comments on "good" writing seem worth while even if rather trite.

This tidy tome is an excellent exposition on the possible origins of language. The etymology of words can be debated, and should be, but Blount makes a convincing case that phoentics are the social Darwinism that drives the beastie that is language. This book is dense, and I am still wading through it, but I think it is an incredible resource for the clever linguist, as well as for those who are just curious.

Roy Blount writes about words and phrases, style, and effectiveness with the authority of a serious linguist and with the sense of immediacy that reflects his enthusiasm in telling me, the reader, how I can benefit in applying what he has learned.