Ali G: How many words does you know?
Noam Chomsky: Normally, humans, by maturity, have tens of thousands of them.
Ali G: What is some of 'em?
—Da Ali G Show 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.
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