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“Alphabetter
Juice Or, The Joy of Text” by Roy Blount Jr.; Sarah
Crichton Books ($26)
“Robert
Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English: A
Compendium of Mistakes in Grammar, Usage, and Spelling
with Commentary on Lexicographers and Linguists”;
Scribner ($17, paperback)
“Lawtalk:
The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions”
by James E. Clapp, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Marc Galanter
and Fred R. Shapiro; Yale University Press ($45)
———
Happy New
Year, and I hope all your resolutions will be more than
just words. But, really, can anything be just words?
Not these
days, when words count, down to the letter, as our
language changes rapidly with new demands. (Tweeters: U
no wat I’m talkinbout.) Our words — in whatever form
or format, even a resolution that may be more a wish
than a plan — are a big part of what makes us human;
they are the concrete end-products of the way we think.
They are
also a source of fascination, and you needn’t be an
etymologist to have a good time tracing word histories
and discovering the strings of ideas that tie together
over time and across oceans to fashion our language.
Publishers, with words as their stock in trade, continue
to commission books about them — the last several
months have seen plenty of releases — and although
some of these consider only grammar, or are frosty takes
on modern usage, most plumb the curious ways in which
our 2012 English has evolved.
I’ve
been spending my spare time (now there’s a phrase with
little original meaning for many of us) with eight of
these books, and I probably could have found more. Three
stand out because they aren’t just general tracts
about our language. Instead, they’re jammed with
fun-fact stuff — information not always useful but
frequently revealing or insightful. These three, all
with alphabetically arranged entries, made me think
about English in new ways or are, simply, a delight.
Roy
Blount Jr.’s follow-up to his 2008 “Alphabet Juice
is Alphabetter Juice,” which is nicely subtitled
“The Joy of Text,” and which came out during the
summer in the first wave of the new word books.
Blount’s train of thought in these entries often
provides a wild ride. An example of this is his entry
for since. After a short look at the early forms of the
conjunction, Blount shakes his head over the different
acceptable usages that can render the word ambiguous.
“Is it merely after your baby left you, or because
your baby left you, that you’ve been living down on
the corner of Lonely Street?” he asks. And then he
goes into a riff about “The West Wing.”
If
you’re a fan of NPR’s weekly news-quiz “Wait, Wait
. . . Don’t Tell Me!,” which features Blount in its
rotating pool of regular panelists, you can hear his
pleasant drawl as you read. He makes the same sort of
feet-on-the-ground observations as he does
extemporaneously on the radio show. Under an entry for
fudge, he cites the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1766
citation of the word’s usage “to represent an
inarticulate expression of indignant disgust.” Asks
Blount: “What’s ‘inarticulate’ about it?” and
then goes on to the next entry.
Inarticulate
— or more to the point, incorrect — is the theme of
“Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable
English,” which came out in November. Fiske, an author
of several books on English and the editor of a monthly
online journal called the Vocabula Review, has collected
lots of evidence to demonstrate the public warping of
our tongue. In a short note at the book’s beginning,
you can see instantly how he acquired so many examples:
70 percent of them come from the Internet, which offers
the most solid argument for editing because it has so
little.
In some
of Fiske’s entries, I found a dispiriting denial that
English remains a living, breathing, and therefore,
changing language — Fiske’s take on enormity, for
instance, recognizes that the word means not only
“awful” but that users commonly resurrect its
archaic meaning as “very large,” and cannot condone
the second usage.
But on
the whole, Fiske’s dictionary gave me plenty to think
about, particularly the varying shades of meaning in
many words for a single concept — one of the treasures
of English. Try disinterest: “Take the typical
American voter’s disinterest in politics ...” is the
sentence Fiske cites, then says, “Use indifference
to.” Then, another example: “For Washingtonians, pop
culture is a threat, a Pied Piper leading Americans down
the road to disinterest.” Says Fiske: “Use
apathy.” A third example comes from talk at Cannes
about the lack of a Hollywood presence “due to the
festival’s inattention or industry disinterest.”
Says Fiske: “Use indifference.”
His point
in all this is that the actual meaning of disinterest,
is impartiality or without bias. Even if you believe
that no one can counteract the blurring of that word,
the options Fiske offers are revealing about the
alternatives our language provides.
Blurring
words can be deadly in the practice of law, which
demands precision English. “Lawtalk,” by a legal
lexicographer, a law librarian, and two law professors
is subtitled “The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar
Legal Expressions,” itself a suspiciously imprecise
idea; how can you put together a book of stories if
they’re unknown? So I opened “Lawtalk” with
creased brow, concerned that it would be sloppy or maybe
esoteric.
Both
counts, dismissed. The stories are fun and
well-researched. Take jailbait, traced to novels of the
‘30s and leading readers to another entry, age of
consent, a smoothly told history of the concept that
even includes a good joke. And while we’re at it, flip
to kill all the lawyers, which considers not only
Shakespeare and his line from Henry VI, Part 2, but also
a real rebellion on behalf of landowners. (And another
joke.) Dig beneath the words we say, and it’s amazing
what you find on your way to the roots.
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