Heck Of A Guy

A Seriously Funny Book About Words That Is Itself Composed Of Words (As Is This Review)

So far, the best use I’ve made of my recently obtained library card has been to check out¹ Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount’s book celebrating the magical conjoining of meanings, connotations, sounds, evocations, and visual appearance into words and sentences.

Alphabet Juice is not a textbook of usage, although it is chock full of writing lessons painlessly taught; it is a set of stories about words arranged in a dictionary format.

I was, in fact, working out, bench-pressing dictionaries and thesauruses, sparring with Strunk and White, paring adverbs and semicolons from my diet, endlessly practicing double entendre – bon mot combinations, and, although I’m not proud of it, injecting myself with black market OED etymological listings in preparation to write a review emulating the author’s own sonicky,² scholarly,³ laugh out loud funny, pun-ificent style when two realizations were visited upon me.

First, the review I planned to write had already been written. Several times. By writers who can turn this trick better than I can. For the record, my favorite of the batch is The Joy of English by Jack Shafer.⁴

The second epiphany affords the prospective reader an efficacious means by which to calculate the likelihood of enjoying Alphabet Juice. While I’ve not competed the double-blind placebo trials, I would wager that there is at least a 90%  correlation between a subject’s positive or negative responses to reading the entire book and to reading the book’s subtitle: “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.”

If you find yourself aroused by the giddiness of those phrases, you’re gonna fall in love with the book. If you have any other reaction to reading the subtitle, well, we feel sorry for you and do want to reassure you that you can, if you seek help now, nonetheless lead a dignified, productive, semi-independent life. In any case, the findings from the testing  thus far (N=1, but it’s an especially astute 1) are certainly consistent with this hypothesis.

Roy Blount

Consequently, I’ll add only that any book that includes this definition of Minimalism, “A little of it goes a long way,” the observation that the pun is “the lowest form of wit, it used to be said, but that was before Ann Coulter,” an explication of Wilt Chamberlain’s nuanced preferences re the articles, “a” and “the,” in a Sports Illustrated story title, and the evolution of Homer Simpson’s trademark “D’oh” has my admiration and deserves my highest recommendation.

For those of you still undecided and those who can’t wait for Amazon’s standard delivery schedule, the New York Times has conveniently excerpted the first chapter at Alphabet Juice Chapter One.

The Mistake From Hell

Richard Lewis and Larry David

Richard Lewis Is Going To Be Pissed

The reader may have heard somewhere that I have found an error in Alphabet Juice.  ‘Tis true.

On page 309 of my library’s edition, we find this segment following mention of Stephen Colbert’s coining of a meme, “truthiness,” only a week into his TV show which , Mr. Blount notes, “undoubtedly … will be in the next Bartlett’s Quotations.”

Did you see the episode of Larry David’s show in which Richard Lewis was trying to get into Bartlett’s for coining the phrase “The mother of all …” and he found out Larry was acquainted with the editor, and of course Larry screwed everything up? I forget the details, but something to do with the extraordinary size of the editor’s young son’s penis. The mother of all son-johnsons.

Alas, the phrase Richard Lewis actually claims to have devised, both on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and in real life, is not “The mother of all …” but “The _____ from hell.”

Josh Ralske, at All Movie Guide, provides a synopsis of the pertinent episode which confirms the roles played by the editor of Bartlett’s and the editor’s son’s large genitalia and also clarifies the phrase Mr. Lewis, as an actor on that show, claims to have created.

Hugh (Tim Kazurinsky), one of the investors in the restaurant, invites Larry (Larry David) and the other investors to a pool party at his house. Larry confirms that Hugh’s company publishes Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and tells Hugh that Richard Lewis wants to be included in the book for coming up with the expression “[blank] from Hell.” Hugh seems dubious, but agrees to look into it. Larry finds out that Jeff (Jeff Garlin) plans to go to the party, and Jeff also tells him that he’s moving back in with Susie (Susie Essman), his estranged wife. He asks Larry not to tell anyone that Susie is pregnant. Larry and Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) stop off at their favorite bakery to buy a cake for the party, and learn that it’s going out of business. Larry insists on buying a sponge cake, which Cheryl thinks no one will eat. But when they get to the party, Jeff says the cake is “like eating a delicious sponge.” Larry needs to use the bathroom, but Hugh’s nanny, Martine (Cheri Oteri), won’t let him into the house, telling him that Hugh has insisted that guests use the cabana. Larry persuades her to let him in, promising he’ll “take full responsibility.” During the party, Larry notices that Hugh’s young son is exceptionally well endowed. A few days later, the investors meet at the restaurant, where they discuss the trouble they’ve had finding a new chef. Larry tells Hugh privately that his son’s “got some penis.” Hugh doesn’t respond well, and when Larry gets home, the unstable Martine is there with a suitcase. She tells him that she’s been fired, and that he’s responsible. [emphasis mine]

The bit from Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, originated from Lewis’s real life efforts to garner credit for the saying, as the Wikipedia entry makes apparent:,

Lewis claims to be the originator of the expression “the ______ from hell” as in “the date from hell” or “the roommate from hell”. This theory is expounded in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “The Nanny from Hell”. Lewis has petitioned the editors of Bartlett’s to be given credit for the coinage, but the editors claim that the phrase was a common idiom prior to Lewis’ use of it. However, the Yale Book of Quotations does attribute the phrase to Lewis.

And why, one might rhetorically (and conveniently) ask, is this mistake important?

Well, the blogger who found this mistake,⁵ might respond that

1. Accuracy is its own justification
2. One has to keep these professional writers on their metaphorical toes – for their own good, of course
3. It kinda wipes out that now unearned punchline about “mother of all son-johnsons”
4. It indicates the value of fact-checkers
5. It raises the possibility I may know more about one subject than Roy Blount does (I admit this is pretty doubtful, but a guy can dream, can’t he?)

The correct answer to why this mistake is important, however, is that it provides me an excuse a serendipitous opportunity to audition on my blog, without seeming too self-serving or self-pitying, a folksy phrase I’ve been working on for the past two weeks in e-mails that include a report on my cold symptoms.  It’s not quite there yet, but see what you think.⁶

What do you think? Bartlett’s-worthy?

1. The double meaning of “check out” has caused a suppressed chortle by the author over the throw-away wordplay, inserted in a review of a book about and composed of wordplay, that is so casual it requires this explanation, which negates the “throw-away” classification and, in turn, calls into question this convoluted, self-devouring footnote.↩
2. ”Sonicky” is a term coined by Blount to describe words (like “sonicky”)  that are “kinesthetically evocative of, or appropriate to, their meaning↩
3. Besides being a practicing humor writer, Blount is an adviser to the American Heritage Dictionary, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a panel member on National Public Radio’s quiz show ” Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.”↩
4. The Joy of English by Jack Shafer. New York Times, November 14, 2008↩
5. OK, the book has been out over a month. Someone must have seen this error while I was on the wait list at the library. Nonetheless, my default criterion for originality these days is whether I find a reference in a search at Google (Google is a mutual friend of Roy Blount’s and mine). I did four or five searches with legitimate search term without turning up a reference to this passage. Good enough for me.↩
6. To my buddies in the audience: It would also be nice if you would pretend you haven’t seen this before when I casually toss it off in a future e-mail.↩