Word Nerd

There were early clues. Take the Dictionary Game, for instance (see 7/31/08 post), or the embarrassing fact that I really liked the Vocabulary lessons in school. Realizing that I have always flipped through each new issue of Reader’s Digest to find the “Word Power” section first would have alerted a more self-aware person, and having one dictionary in my office, one by my chair at home, one downloaded on my laptop, and an electronic one in my purse probably should have tipped me off.

Buying a book called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages really should have been the final straw. But when I read a review of a book by Roy Blount, Jr. titled

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

and got really excited about buying it, I recognized the truth: I am a Word Nerd.

Blount is a prolific writer in many genres. He’s written essays and novels, reported on sports, compiled a humorous anthology, written cultural commentary and light verse. He’s acted occasionally, is an oral storyteller, a lecturer, and a regular on NPR’s quiz show Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me. He’s a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a usage adviser to the American Heritage Dictionary. It sure sounds like he’s qualified to write a book about words.

Reviewer Michael Dirda explains,

“The title Alphabet Juice derives from its author’s contention that sound and sense are often strikingly related, that certain letters and combinations of letters possess a gut-level electricity, and that ‘through centuries of knockabout breeding and intimate contact with the human body’ some words ‘have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth.’ A high-fiber word like ‘grunt’ sounds right for what it means. Good diction thus tends to be sonicky. Blount’s neologism for that ‘quality of a word whose sound doesn’t imitate a sound, like boom or poof, but does somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish or vim.’ To write well, then, we need to use our tongue and ears, not only our mind and fingers.”

Dirda reveals that the book contains many lists, such as Blount’s favorite one-word, two-word, and three-word sentences. For example: “Fuhgeddaboudit.” “Jesus wept.” and “Call me Ishmael.” Blount discusses eccentric names in life and literature, takes jabs at politicians, and celebrates “the New York Times, the South, and lively English.”

Blount may have dubbed himself a “shade-tree lexicographer,” but this Word Nerd is definitely impressed. And headed to the bookstore.

[For the complete review, see “Blount’s bountiful wit infuses Alphabet Juice” in the 10/19/08 edition of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 4H]