Our venerable squiggles

Around midmorning on Christmas day I'm sitting in front of the fire wearing my silly snowman socks (meaning I and not the fire am wearing the socks, and if I can't wear silly snowman socks on Christmas morning, when can I wear them?) while my daughter reads aloud all the warnings printed in the manual for her new cell phone, including helpful hints about the inadvisability of putting the cellphone in the microwave or feeding it to the dog and one sentence stating, in essence, that "cell phones should not be used where cell phones should not be used," the sort of tautology that normally inspires me, at the very least, to emit a moist snort of despair over the future of the human race, but not today. I am undistractable today, unassailable behind a wall of brand-new Christmas books, including Toni Morrison's new novel and Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ismael Beah and Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up (and if that odd collection doesn't suggest a little something about the odd state of my brain cells, then nothing does), but the book that is currently making me entirely undistractable is the delicious Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr., worth reading for its subtitle alone: "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."

An unusual abecedarius is Alphabet Juice: a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of attitude. Blount's delight in the English language is clear in his entry on consonants:

Fiddling with letters is pleasant to me, but the pleasure is not as pure as my father's in his basement workshop, scratching around in his store of nuts, bolts, tacks, nails, brads, woodscrews, lockwashers, sockets, grommets, early-American fasteners inherited from his father or his father's father, and other doodads conceivably functional enough, or curious enough, to be held on to....He was a man of large, stressful business and civic affairs, but I like to think of him rattling small hardware bits in the bowels of our home, the way a less reliable man might jingle his pocket change as he sets out on the town.

Alphabet Juice reveals Blount going about his father's business, except the small hardware bits he rattles about are words, letters, roots, and sounds. His many lists and peculiar juxtapositions jingle like pocket change, but he'll also introduce each coin's family tree and show how to spend it effectively. He explains the book's title thus: "Alphabet juice. The quirky but venerable squiggles which through centuries of knockabout breeding and intimate contact with the human body have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth."

"If you handle them right," begins the next sentence. For anyone seeking some tasty advice on correctly handling our venerable squiggles, I can do no better than to suggest a large serving of Alphabet Juice.