The Joy of English: Roy Blount Jr.'s etymological journey.

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, by Roy Blount Jr. 364 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Roy Blount Jr. has returned from the fields where the American lingo grows wild to write "Alphabet Juice," his personal lexicon, usage manual, writers' guidebook, etymological investigation and literary junk drawer. This alphabetically arranged book reads like a big bag of salty snacks: nibble five or six of its 500-plus entries and you'll have to wolf the whole thing.

Who before Blount thought to construct a complete conversation using only English vowels? Give a listen:

" 'ey!"

"Eeeee!"

"I. . . . "

"Oh, you."

Who before Blount admired "it" as "the skinniest of all two-letter words"? Who thought to bust Buckminster Fuller for writing, "I seem to be a verb"? Because "verb" is a noun, Blount points out, Fuller was really saying, "I seem to be a noun," when he made his famous declaration.

A self-diagnosed hyperlexic since first grade, Blount hangs out in dictionaries the way other writers hang out in bars. It's easy to picture him making a pub crawl of the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), the Random House unabridged dictionary and especially the American Heritage Dictionary, where he helps tend bar as a member of its official usage panel. Both giddy and sober, as if ripped on Old Crow fortified with Adderall, Blount chases letters, words and phrases to their origins, and when stumped he hypothesizes.

Take "quirky," for example. Origin unknown, but Blount speculates that "quirk" was born following "the union of 'quick' and something more pejorative, perhaps 'jerk.' " Why, he asks, do so many re-duplicative expressions or near-reduplicative expressions start with "h" ("hill-billy," "hippy-dippy," "handy-dandy," "hanky-panky," "hocus-pocus," "hoity-toity," "hoodoo," "hotsy-totsy," "hully gully," "humdrum," "hurdy-gurdy"), beating out the runner-up, "w"? His answer:

"You will note that many of those 'h' expressions refer to disorder and jumblement. Most are of unknown origin. (No matter what you may have learned at your mother's knee, 'hunky-dory' probably does not come from a street in Yokohama where sailors could find a bit of all right.) They're the sort of expressions that people pull out of the air to convey something otherwise indefinable, like 'whatchamajig.' "

From there he redirects his inquiry to the entry for the letter "h"--which does not contain the "h" sound, having "lost one of its aitches when it came into English from the French hache"--and wonders if the ease of forming the "h" sound with just a breath explains its ubiquity.

There's no aspect of our language, written, spoken or grunted, that escapes Blount appraisal. Like that other lay linguist H. L. Mencken, who beat the pros at their own game with "The American Language," he figures that if amateurs are qualified to create language and authorized to mutate it, why leave the fun of tasting, dissecting and quarreling over it to the professoriate?

Marginalized as a humorist (like Mencken) because he knows how to write funny, Blount is also a superb reporter who possesses an imaginative intellect (also like Mencken). Disdaining those scholars who think the relation between words and their meanings is arbitrary, he argues that "all language, at some level, is body language." Beyond the clearly imitative words, like the onomatopoeic "boom," "poof" and "gong," Blount zeroes in on the expressive words that "somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: 'queasy' or 'rickety' or 'zest' or 'sluggish' or 'vim,' "he writes. "If you were a cave person earnestly trying to communicate how you felt digestively, you might without benefit of any verbal tradition come up with something close to 'nausea.' "

Blount has coined a term to describe words like these that are "kinesthetically evocative of, or appropriate to, their meaning": it's "sonicky," and it appears so frequently in "Alphabet Juice" that it deserves billing in the subtitle. Other sonicky words Blount traps and releases: "lick," "heebie-jeebies," "ka-ching," "chunky," "blink," "squeeze," "foist," "weird," "wonky," "finicky" and "wobbly." " 'Sphincter' is tight; 'goulash' is lusciously hodgepodgy," he writes. " 'Swoon' emerged from the Old English swogan, to suffocate, because the mind and the mouth conspired to replace 'og' with 'oo' in order to register a different motion-feeling." To Blount's sonicky list, allow me to add "snot."

The mind-mouth conspiracy to which Blount refers leads him to meditate on the pleasure of saying "polyurethane foam." The surplus of vowels, the "fluidity" of its meter and "the conjunction of that 'y' pronounced like a long 'e' and that 'ur' like 'yoor' " get primary credit for bliss. Feeling " 'polyurethane foam' . . . running around in my mind's ear and mouth is like watching otters play in the water," he says. The scientist in him holds and measures words; the poet tickles them and begs to be tickled back. At one moment he has you beholding the most exquisitely balanced word in English ("level"), and at another he's schooling you in the frequency with which "t" evokes disapproval, as in "tut-tut," "too-too," "tittle-tattle," "tacky tacky tacky," "fat," "rat," "catty," "tatty," "twit" and "all hat and no cattle."

Like many writers, I keep a few books on a shelf to unclog my brain for those times when the right combination of words refuses to muster for service (currently in rotation are "Blood Meridian," "Beneath the Underdog," "Mumbo Jumbo" and "1001 Afternoons in Chicago"). To that pantheon I add "Alphabet Juice" for its erudition, its grand fun and its contrary view on what constitutes good writing. Real writers are supposed to "murder their darlings"--that is, purge any vivid phrase that calls excessive attention to the author. This advice has been variously attributed to Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Orwell, Auden and others, but Blount traces it to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 1916 book, "On the Art of Writing." "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it--wholeheartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings," Quiller-Couch wrote.

As one who labored for 15 years as an editor urging writers to birth their darlings and nurture them so that we would have something interesting to publish, I cheered after reading Blount's critique of this maxim. What is "murder your darlings" but a giant, throbbing, attention-grabbing darling itself? Quiller-Couch could have written "kill your pets" or "eliminate your sweeties" if he was so keen on scrubbing his copy of brilliant phrases, Blount writes, demolishing the famous directive by quoting passages in its vicinity. They swarm with darlings!

Not that Blount counsels self-indulgence. Writing "needs to be quick, so it's readable at first glance and also worth lingering over." This book is both, and danced in Blount's arms, English swings smartly. My admiration for "Alphabet Juice" only swelled when it proposed a conclusion for this review. Reviewers like to apply the word "uneven" to books they're fond of, he suggests, but have a few reservations about. "Would you want to read a book that was even?" he asks.

Yes, very much so. And I just did.

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