[Alphabetter Juice 01] • Alphabetter Juice

**Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists

**No man of letters savors the ABC’s, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from *ad* *hominy* to *zizz*,* *is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in *Alphabet Juice*, to wide acclaim. Now, *Alphabetter Juice*. Which is *better*.

This book* *is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, *ew*, doing in *beautiful* and *cutie*? Why is *toadless*, but not *frogless*, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in *gollywoddles*? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of *hunch*? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com?

Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount* *draws upon everything from *The Tempest* to *The Wire*. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a “girl gillie,” and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a “giantess” than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with *kludge *and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over *supercalifragilisticexpialidocious *leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to *metanarrative.

*As Michael Dirda wrote in *The Washington Post Book World*, “The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,’ that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat.” *Alphabetter Juice* is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.