By Roy Blount Jr.
Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists
No guy of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving slapstick comedian Roy Blount Jr. His word list, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, complete bodied, and out to delight discriminating palates coarse and advantageous. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combos in Alphabet Juice, to broad acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. that is better.
This ebook is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or occupation grammarian—who likes to get actual with phrases. what's the common signal of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, yet now not frogless, within the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. best court docket locate relevance in gollywoddles? may well there be clinical proof for the sonicky worth of hunch? And why may an individual now not hassle to spell properly the very observe he's attempting to outline on Urbandictionary.com?
Digging into how locutions evolve, and paintings, or fail, Blount attracts upon every little thing from The Tempest to The Wire. he is taking us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, the place a individual etymologist bites off extra of a "giantess" than he can chunk. Jimmy Stewart seems, in reference to kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a classic werewolf motion picture; information of possum-tossing, to metanarrative.
As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington put up e-book World, "The immensely likeable Blount truly possesses what was once referred to as within the Italian Renaissance 'sprezzatura,' that infrequent and enviable skill to do even the main tricky issues with out breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a style.
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Additional resources for Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text
Example text
Usually the meaning is apparent from the context. Homographs and homophones can safely exist because both spoken and written language have a high level of redundancy: there are more than enough clues to the meaning. 1 Distinguish two different grammatical structures that occur with each of the following groups of words written as homographs: (a) aged, blessed, crooked, cursed, dogged, learned; (b) analyses, axes, bases, ellipses; (c) abuse, close, diffuse, excuse, house, use. < previous page page_33 next page > < previous page page_34 next page > Page 34 Discussion Classification of homographs and homophones may seem trivial to a literate native speaker, but put yourself in the position of a foreign learner or someone learning to read and write.
Discussion The results of such an enquiry are fairly predictable. You will probably be offered: 1 ‘ before ’, referring to orgy, orgies, deny, denies . Reference rules These can be called REFERENCE RULES, since they are memorable and you have them to refer to when you are hesitant about a particular spelling. The more closely one looks at rule (1), the more peculiar it seems. It helps to decide between in believe, etc.
The wider the page or column, the less need there will be for word division, so the best place to < previous page page_55 next page > < previous page page_56 next page > Page 56 study this practice under pressure is in text with a narrow-column layout, as in newspapers. 2 Suppose you were printing a text and your line of type could not take a whole word at the end. Where would you split the word in the following cases? accepted athlete baker bundle danger defensive dictation eventually festive frisky knickers lastly latest laundry mangey newspaper notable planting problem product quarter rational saleable shredded singeing solid spaghetti stadium veteran whitish Discussion You will aim to leave at the end of the line part of a word that is pronounceable as one or more syllables, hence the guidelines followed by typesetters are sometimes called ‘syllabification’ rules.