26th
Read: Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount Jr.
The full title is 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, which perhaps says more about the book than I could hope to in such a small space. Blount is a great, funny writer, and the book is structured as a trip through the alphabet with stops at his favorite words and phrases (or his pet peeves). While in most cases, I agree with many of his complaints about the state of modern language usage, I can’t help but notice that he is sometimes indiscriminate about what transitions of usage he accepts and which he resists. Language is an evolving medium, and it seems to me that you must accept the good along with the bad. (This was one of two language-related books I got for Christmas; the second of which, Henry Hitchings’s The Secret Life of Words, I’m still working on slowly. It takes me much longer to read non-fiction than fiction on average).
