2009 Reading List - Alphabet Juice
Book Twenty-five
Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr.
When I was last home for Christmas, my mother pretty much shoved this book into my hands and said, "You have to read this." And far be it from me to ignore my mother's advice, except possibly that little tidbit about being trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space. I kinda spaced out on that one. Probably wasn't important....
Anyway, Mom was right. Like nearly everyone else in my family, I am a lover of language. I read voraciously (as you well know), I've dabbled in writing - songs, stories and poems - and I make a living teaching non-speakers the joys of being English speakers. I grew up in a literate household, with a mother who used to teach me Latin roots whenever I asked "What does this mean?" My words are the way I express my thoughts and the way I understand the world, and as such they are as precious jewels - to be cherished and admired, used with elegance and style, and not wasted on fripperies and tacky indulgence.
Roy Blount Jr is a kindred spirit indeed. He's a humorist, the author of about two dozen books and a regular panelist on one of my favorite radio shows - Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.... He talks with a slow southern drawl and never seems to hurry. This is the kind of person who savors his language and treasures his words. He's not only interested in the meanings of words, or the sounds, but in the very feel of them. And if you're the kind of person who never thought about how words feel when you say them, this book might do you some good.
Think of a word. Any word. How about doldrums? It's a great word, a "sonicky" word, to use the term that Blount coins in this book to mean "a word whose sound doesn't imitate the concept it represents (like boom or poof), but rather evokes the essence of the word." Say that word out loud - doldrums. Doldrummmmsss.... If you were asked to come up with a word that describes a seemingly endless, unchanging environment, you could do worse than this one. It's got flat vowels, heavy and pendulous, that practically sit in the bottom of your mouth, defying your tongue's attempt to shift them. Then it ends in a flat hum that becomes a thin and lifeless hiss. Doldrums.
It is clear that Blount takes great pleasure in the sounds of words and the feelings of words as phonemes slide, crash and bump together, but he's also interested in the etymology of words. He looks into the origins of some of the most innocuous words in the language - and some of the most useful - and looks at how they descend from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European roots. Take the P.I.E. room pag- which has given us such a diverse crop of words as pagan, compact, pole, pace and pageant. All this from a little word that meant, roughly, "to fasten." The words that we speak have taken a long and wild journey to get into our minds and our mouths. Some were ported directly from Latin, others took a longer route. But every word that you speak has great history behind it.
Finally, of course, there is meaning. Without meaning, words are just sounds and aggregations of letters. One of the big questions that Blount hits over and over again is whether words mean something for a reason or if they've just been arbitrarily assigned to ideas and things. There are those who hold to that idea - that a word like "go" is no better or worse suited to its job than iku or jít or aller (Japanese, Czech and French, respectively). There's something to that, I suppose - after all, if one sound really were perfectly suited to a concept, why would other languages bother to use so many variations? Or, y'know, exist? You would think that eventually the speakers of other languages would hear "Go" and think, "That's IT! That's the word!" If that were the case, it would probably have put me out of a job.
So there probably is some element of arbitrariness in language, but Blount isn't very convinced by that idea. He says that there are so many words - such as doldrums or go, which fit their ideas so very, very well - how could such an appropriate set of sounds have just been arbitrarily given to these ideas? Words like scribble, itch, wrest, pool - words whose sounds and meanings match so very well, how could they be arbitrary?
The most likely answer, of course, is that language defines how you understand the world. As an English speaker Blount has inextricably connected these words and ideas in his head, and to suggest that, say, berceuse is perfectly suited to describe a soft song sung to children to get them to sleep would be asking an English speaker to put aside a whole lot of the associations he or she had made about lullaby.
This isn't an academic book, though, so don't worry about that. Blount has made a career out of entertaining with his words, and he doesn't put that aside just because he's doing language analysis. He brings up common words, unusual words, thought-provoking and laugh-inducing topics, all arranged - of course - alphabetically. You can jump backwards and forwards through the book, following the cross-references, and still enjoy it to its fullest. In fact, Blount recommends that you do so.
Language is our way of making the world make sense, no matter what language it is. For those of us who are native English speakers, we look at the world through a complex and sometimes baffling language. It's hard to learn (and hard to teach), sometimes frustrating to deal with and occasionally incapable of doing what we need it to do. But it's part of our cultural heritage - our cultural DNA, if you will - and deserves appreciation. So take a gander at this book - read it, savor it, enjoy it, and then look at your language afresh. You'll be glad you did.
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"English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies."
- Roy Blount, Jr., Alphabet Juice
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Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr.
When I was last home for Christmas, my mother pretty much shoved this book into my hands and said, "You have to read this." And far be it from me to ignore my mother's advice, except possibly that little tidbit about being trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space. I kinda spaced out on that one. Probably wasn't important....
Anyway, Mom was right. Like nearly everyone else in my family, I am a lover of language. I read voraciously (as you well know), I've dabbled in writing - songs, stories and poems - and I make a living teaching non-speakers the joys of being English speakers. I grew up in a literate household, with a mother who used to teach me Latin roots whenever I asked "What does this mean?" My words are the way I express my thoughts and the way I understand the world, and as such they are as precious jewels - to be cherished and admired, used with elegance and style, and not wasted on fripperies and tacky indulgence.
Roy Blount Jr is a kindred spirit indeed. He's a humorist, the author of about two dozen books and a regular panelist on one of my favorite radio shows - Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.... He talks with a slow southern drawl and never seems to hurry. This is the kind of person who savors his language and treasures his words. He's not only interested in the meanings of words, or the sounds, but in the very feel of them. And if you're the kind of person who never thought about how words feel when you say them, this book might do you some good.
Think of a word. Any word. How about doldrums? It's a great word, a "sonicky" word, to use the term that Blount coins in this book to mean "a word whose sound doesn't imitate the concept it represents (like boom or poof), but rather evokes the essence of the word." Say that word out loud - doldrums. Doldrummmmsss.... If you were asked to come up with a word that describes a seemingly endless, unchanging environment, you could do worse than this one. It's got flat vowels, heavy and pendulous, that practically sit in the bottom of your mouth, defying your tongue's attempt to shift them. Then it ends in a flat hum that becomes a thin and lifeless hiss. Doldrums.
It is clear that Blount takes great pleasure in the sounds of words and the feelings of words as phonemes slide, crash and bump together, but he's also interested in the etymology of words. He looks into the origins of some of the most innocuous words in the language - and some of the most useful - and looks at how they descend from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European roots. Take the P.I.E. room pag- which has given us such a diverse crop of words as pagan, compact, pole, pace and pageant. All this from a little word that meant, roughly, "to fasten." The words that we speak have taken a long and wild journey to get into our minds and our mouths. Some were ported directly from Latin, others took a longer route. But every word that you speak has great history behind it.
Finally, of course, there is meaning. Without meaning, words are just sounds and aggregations of letters. One of the big questions that Blount hits over and over again is whether words mean something for a reason or if they've just been arbitrarily assigned to ideas and things. There are those who hold to that idea - that a word like "go" is no better or worse suited to its job than iku or jít or aller (Japanese, Czech and French, respectively). There's something to that, I suppose - after all, if one sound really were perfectly suited to a concept, why would other languages bother to use so many variations? Or, y'know, exist? You would think that eventually the speakers of other languages would hear "Go" and think, "That's IT! That's the word!" If that were the case, it would probably have put me out of a job.
So there probably is some element of arbitrariness in language, but Blount isn't very convinced by that idea. He says that there are so many words - such as doldrums or go, which fit their ideas so very, very well - how could such an appropriate set of sounds have just been arbitrarily given to these ideas? Words like scribble, itch, wrest, pool - words whose sounds and meanings match so very well, how could they be arbitrary?
The most likely answer, of course, is that language defines how you understand the world. As an English speaker Blount has inextricably connected these words and ideas in his head, and to suggest that, say, berceuse is perfectly suited to describe a soft song sung to children to get them to sleep would be asking an English speaker to put aside a whole lot of the associations he or she had made about lullaby.
This isn't an academic book, though, so don't worry about that. Blount has made a career out of entertaining with his words, and he doesn't put that aside just because he's doing language analysis. He brings up common words, unusual words, thought-provoking and laugh-inducing topics, all arranged - of course - alphabetically. You can jump backwards and forwards through the book, following the cross-references, and still enjoy it to its fullest. In fact, Blount recommends that you do so.
Language is our way of making the world make sense, no matter what language it is. For those of us who are native English speakers, we look at the world through a complex and sometimes baffling language. It's hard to learn (and hard to teach), sometimes frustrating to deal with and occasionally incapable of doing what we need it to do. But it's part of our cultural heritage - our cultural DNA, if you will - and deserves appreciation. So take a gander at this book - read it, savor it, enjoy it, and then look at your language afresh. You'll be glad you did.
---------------------------------------------------
"English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies."
- Roy Blount, Jr., Alphabet Juice
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