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Roy Blount considers whether all words are created equal.
While each week our economy implodes in new and exciting ways, author and raconteur Roy Blount Jr. sees another one of our sacred systems on the verge of collapse. When we asked Blount, on the phone from his home in western Massachusetts, whether he wrote his new book Alphabet Juice as a way of defending the English language, he initially kid-gloved the question with a halfhearted, “I guess so.” But after a little prodding, the levee broke.
“The written word isn’t being attacked so much as ignored,” says Blount, 67, a man who may be known best to Chicagoans as a regular feature on the WBEZ news quiz, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. “When things get too distantly derived, they tend to lose their value. More and more we’ve seen that happen with the stock market, where the idea of money has gotten away from the actual value of money. And it seems to me we ignore where words have come from or what they mean.”
Ever since Lynne Truss’s runaway 2003 best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, loads of books on grammar and language have flooded bookstores. But none takes the idiosyncratic route of Blount’s latest. Alphabet Juice (FSG, $25) is his attempt to restore a little glory to our embattled ABC’s. In his letter-by-letter glossary of misused and misunderstood bits of language, Blount takes many forms. We see him affect the piety of a high-school English teacher when he spends a fair amount of time reaffirming the subjunctive. And, of course, years of writing have given him his own peeves on language, as in the entry for mishit, which reads simply: “Should be hyphenated, for decency’s sake.”
The book is impossible to read from front to back, as nearly every entry references another note (oink’s entry suggests readers turn to groin). Blount says it was always his intention that readers dive in and get lost. Winding one’s way through the book, it’s clear that even when he’s digging through a word’s etymology, Blount can’t help but tell a story. In an entry under “Wilt: a Tall Tale,” Blount relates a shaggy dog story about legendary basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Blount had been assigned to write the story of Wilt’s retirement for Sports Illustrated, but when the headline dubbed Chamberlain “A Dominant Force,” the Stilt and his entourage argued persuasively for replacing a with the more committal the.
The LOLcat–favorite teh, as a replacement for the, even warrants its own charitable Alphabet Juice entry, as Blount is surprisingly open to Web- and text-messaging-spawned words.
“Some of it is good,” he says. “Teh is interesting. But some of it leeches the juice out of words. I read that people are no longer going to the trouble of writing awesome, they’re shortening it to aws. That seems regrettable—there’s not much awe left in awesome.”
He still believes that the keyboard and keypad will never be able to compete with the tongue. Ask him about it, and you’ll get as discursive and idiosyncratic tour of his favorite words as you get in Alphabet Juice.
“All English is body English,” he says. “It behooves the writer to write things that people like to run through their mouths. Behooves is a fun word to say. So is prestidigitation.”
Blount reads Saturday 8.
