I’m reading Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr. This is one of those delightful books that leads you to read it out of sequence by linking one entry to another, compelling you to jump from one area to another from sheer interest.
Blount looks at everything from etymologies to computer text-slang, to how the sounds of letters develop a meaning of their own–all in a dry and humorous style that keeps you reading while possibly teaching you something of value about language.
Some notes from the book on the word ain’t: “Too bad this tangy, useful verb, which was standard in the eighteenth century, has been so stigmatized since the nineteenth. Just as y’all, as a plural of you, fills a gap in English, so does ain’t as a conjunction of am not. Anyone attempting to pronounce amn’t may a attract a cowd of well-wishers admiring his or her pluck, but whatever other words the speaker surrounds it with will be lost.”
Later in the same entry, speaking of other reasons to use ain’t he gives these examples: “…where would American song lyrics be without ain’t? … ‘There is no cure for the summertime blues.’ ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ ‘Two Out of Three Isn’t Bad.’”
I was going to include his sample song lyric, “Amn’t Misbehaving’”, but how would I have indicated the apostrophe shortening the word “misbehaving” in the sentence I was quoting since I was already reducing his quotation marks to apostrophes in order to fit them into my quotation marks? I suppose that’s why we sometime indent a longer quotation? Clearly I ain’t no grammaratition.
A bit from another entry, this one on arts, the: “‘Maybe it’s true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance,” said Quentin Crisp, … but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.’ (See common and funny looks.)” Which, of course, makes you itch to move on to one of those entries instead of going directly from the arts to the next entry, A’s, which is about the baseball team in Oakland.
Did books have this delightful tendency to provide links in their books before the World Wide Web came along? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I have no answer. Or I ain’t go no answer.
I find myself amusing (no conceit here) in that I write roughly in Blount’s style here to help convey the essence of his book.
BTW, this entry is a great to write on a new curvy keyboard where you need to learn the exact distance to stretch your pinky to type a parentheses, an apostrophe, and a quote mark. Not to mention finding that elusive “Q”.
In addition to authoritative print dictionaries he has consulted, Blount also mentions web sites (websites?) he visited in compiling the book, and so links to the Internet as well as to his own entries.
See etymologies.com, except that I just went there and found that it’s one of those unregistered web site names that gives you a this-name-is-not-registered-you-could-buy it/search page. So, I must have the name wrong, and now I don’t know what the correct URL was for the website. Etymonline looks possible although I don’t think it’s the one he mentioned. Another reason to keep a notepad at hand while you read, or at least use paperclips or post-it notes.
And I don’t think I’ve using “parsing” quite correctly in the title of this entry, but I liked the sound of it.
I’m getting exhausted from trying to put quotation marks, apostrophes, italics and bold print in the right places here in addition to constantly worrying about my use of punctuation. For that problem, I could refer to another book on my shelf: Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences, but not right now, so I’ll close instead by recommending Blount’s book to the highest degree. And not so much Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences.
