A Conversation with Roy Blount Jr. (minicast)

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If you’re listening to A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett, and I’m sitting here with Roy Blunt Jr., who you probably know from the game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and from his many books.

Roy, the latest book is a book called Alphabet Juice, which is kind of a, I guess, a dictionary of your thoughts on interesting words.

Yeah, but it has a thesis, which is that people, when they talk about language, tend for some reason to overlook the intrinsic value of letters and sounds and the sounds of words.

I heard you talking recently, and you used, for instance, the word “tick,” meaning, you know, a jerky movement.

Sure.

That’s not onomatopoeia, but it has a kind of kinesthetic atness, I think.

Also, the word “articulate” is, you have to be articulate to say articulate.

Each of those consonants has to be crisp, right?

You can mumble, mumble, or you can murmur, murmur, but you can’t mumble articulate.

And you call this being “sonic-y,” a word is “sonic-y,” so it’s something beyond onomatopoeia.

Yeah, it could be onomatopoeia, but it also could just be kinesthetic, what your mouth goes through in producing the word.

So do you think that the words adopt different behaviors in our mouths because of what the words mean, or is it the other way around?

Well, I think it’s chicken and the egg.

Is that what I mean?

Yeah, sure.

A little bit of both.

It’s circular, right?

A little bit of feedback both ways?

Yeah.

I mean, words that are expressive in sonic-y ways tend to win out in the evolution of language.

They tend to be used more often.

People enjoy using them, but they carry an electrical power, which I think of as alphabet juice.

And I’ve always wanted to write a word book, but I was reading a linguistics text the other day, or a while back, and it said that the relationship between words and their meaning is arbitrary.

Another word you used recently was “weasily.”

Sounds like the thing that it is, doesn’t it?

You wouldn’t use the word— “Kittenly” would never be negative, right?

Yeah, “weasel” is not a kitten.

No, but a kitten is kind of cute.

So what you’re saying here, and I sense this in the book, is that there’s this kind of baggage or extra information that travels with words that we know instinctively as native English speakers, and yet the dictionaries, as good as they might be, don’t necessarily impart that to us.

There are more flags, there are more things to be said that pass along, right?

Well, in definitions, if you go back to the derivations and the etymology of a word, they often say “echoic,” like the word “cricket.”

They’ll say it’s “imitative” or “echoic.”

And then also dictionaries will send you back—the American Heritage Dictionary, which is my favorite dictionary, has this appendix in the back of Indo-European roots, and you’ll look up the word, I don’t know, some word, and it’ll say “see big.”

It’ll take you back there into that appendix where you find these early proto-words that just have all this great sound to them.

And they’ve been incredibly productive.

American Heritage does have some of the best etymologies, I think, in a mainstream dictionary.

And you sit on the usage panel, which means that you’re one of the people that, with a bunch of other people of your stature, you vote on what the best kind of usage there is for modern English, right?

You try to give advice to the reader so that they can make the wise choices.

They will say 64% of the usage panel disapproves of this usage.

Have you ever been the odd man out on the panel?

Yeah.

I think that I’m in the minority on “hopefully.”

I still hold out against “hopefully,” just because it irritates me.

You know, if you get a letter from L.L.

Bean saying, “Hopefully this will reach you by Christmas,” you don’t know.

I’d rather hear L.L.

Bean saying, “We hope it will reach you by Christmas,” then you know at least maybe you’re supposed to be hoping.

You don’t know who’s hoping.

Let me ask you, as someone who represents—maybe I’m putting more on you than you want—southern culture, would you say that, particularly when you’re in places that aren’t southern at all, that you are kind of seen as the guy who can talk about the South with some authority and some expertise, right?

Oh, yeah.

Probably more than I should be seen that way, but I have talked about the South a lot and written about the South.

You wrote a book about walking through New Orleans, right?

Yeah.

And it sounded, in an interview sense, and it sounded in that book as if this is a place that’s special to you.

You spent some time there, I gather?

Yeah, it’s my favorite city to visit, and I lived there one summer when I was just out of college, and I love New Orleans.

Yeah, the book’s called “Feet on the Street” rambles through New Orleans.

New Orleans is a great place to listen to people talk, and it still has lots of people who are New Orleanians.

Even after Katrina, people have come back.

But they haven’t all returned, have they?

No, they sure have not all.

The oyster shucking class, for instance, has a hard time finding a place to live.

But still, it still has a lot of flavor and a lot of linguistic flair.

Do you find that dictionaries will represent those Southernisms, those Southern ways of speaking, that vocabulary, those vowels?

Do you find that the dictionaries really represent that properly?

I mean, even American Heritage doesn’t have that many dialect pronunciations in there.

There are words like “tump.”

Sure, it’s “tump something over,” right?

“Tump something over” is in the American Heritage, and lots of times they will say “chiefly Southern” or “chiefly Northern.”

But I think that Southerners tend to enjoy language and take pleasure in the orality of language more, perhaps.

I think people in New York do too.

I think I’d buy that.

I think it might be due to some of the Scots-Irish heritage, which is a storytelling heritage.

An Afro-African heritage.

It’s a mixture of African and Celtic.

Two different storytelling cultures kind of coming together, right?

Storytelling, oral, and not so much respective of book-learning, you know?

And drinking and riding horses and things.

There’s a kind of wildness in the South, also a kind of prurience.

I mean, it’s kind of piety, obviously.

But it’s sort of like Irish culture and Southern culture is similar in lots of ways, a mixture of repression and wildness and religion and lyricism.

And that’s why, you know, that’s why rock and roll came from the South.

I think so too.

I can see you have a fondness for that in your book.

The book is “Alphabet Juice,” and we’re talking with Roy Blunt Jr.

One of the things you mentioned on your bio on your website is that you, well, you don’t use this word, but you went noodling in Illinois.

Yeah, for catfish, right.

This is fishing by hand.

You stick your hand under what?

How does it work?

It’s supposed to be a hollow log, but actually it was a culvert pipe.

But it was down under the water, and you reach in there.

The catfish like to swim up in these pipes.

Somebody stands at the other end so they can’t back out.

And you reach in and let the catfish bite down on your hand, and then you grab its lower jaw and you pull it out and run a stringer through it.

That’s almost certain for bloody knuckles, though, right?

Well, I wore a rubber glove.

Oh, okay.

There we go.

I did it, and they all did.

Fortunately, my catfish did not weigh more than about 15 pounds, but some of them are huge, and you have to wrestle them, and the water’s up to your chin.

But, you know, I felt like I deserved to eat that catfish.

Well, I just want to ask you before we go, while I’ve got you here, you recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader.

And it has this function where the books that are on it can be read aloud by a computerized voice.

And you were arguing on behalf of the Authors Guild, of which you’re the president, that this was an unfair performance.

And Amazon, probably much to many people’s pleasure, agreed to make it an optional feature.

What was your argument there?

Did you feel — well, the argument is we don’t know — you know, there’s so many different ways for authors not to make money on the Internet.

You’re telling me my book was just remaindered.

But it could be that audio is going to replace print.

We don’t know — I mean, bookstores and book publishers are — everything’s up for grabs up in the air these days.

And so any time there’s something that resembles a rights grab by some big concern like Amazon, that’s incumbent upon the Authors Guild to say, “Wait a minute.”

Maybe this is something that authors ought to get a separate royalty, because, you know, you get paid royalty from the e-book aspect of the Kindle.

But if they start adding, I mean, in effect, the Kindle to — you know, you can listen to a whole book on it.

So some people say, “Well, you wouldn’t listen to a whole book. It’s terrible. You didn’t understand.”

On the other hand, people say they want it.

So it’s an issue that needs not to slip past us, because someday these recorded — these computer voices are getting more and more sensitive and more and more sophisticated.

They sound pretty good, don’t they?

Yeah.

And people say, “Well, I wouldn’t want to curl up and listen to War and Peace on an electronic voice.”

I wouldn’t either.

But there are books I could think of that probably sound just about as good on an electronic voice as not.

At any rate, it does seem to be infringing on a right of authors, and authors — the occupation of being an author is a challenged one anyway.

And so we felt we ought to make the case that this should be — involve another royalty.

The position of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which responded in a letter to the editor in the Times, was that if the text-to-speech function did constitute a performance, then it’s a private performance and therefore covered under fair use.

Well, why is it private?

I mean, people said, “Well, you must be against reading bedtime stories to your children.”

I mean, people did say that.

But that’s a private performance.

But a device that carries a — that people sell to you, partly because it will read to you, seems to me not a private.

But don’t author contracts — and I’m not kind of arguing here, just a position to kind of figure it out.

Don’t author contracts tend to account for electronic rights and performance rights from the start?

Isn’t this something between the author and the publisher and not the publisher and Amazon?

Yeah, there are audio rights and then there are, like, e-book rights, and they’re two different things.

If you’re selling both of those things in one device, then you could charge an extra dollar for it and — but it’s not currently — this kind of thing isn’t currently accounted for in typical author contracts?

I think it is in the ones that I’ve signed and the ones that I’ve had signed.

Well, as I say, you mean that one device would have — well, no.

There always seem to be these clauses that account for electronic rights or account for performance rights.

And it seems to me that this kind of thing would be covered under the rights that are typically outlined in a contract between the author and the publisher.

There are — well, yeah, but there’s — and that’s why publishers are beginning to say that they’re not going to go along with this.

Right.

But audio rights are specified separately in contracts from e-book rights.

Because people thought of e-books as things that downloaded text.

Right.

And there’s new things happening.

Yeah, a lot of people had said that the Amazon Kindle is, in many ways, just a good Internet browsing tool, and maybe even not for e-books at all.

So we’re seeing the merging of devices, and so the suggestion here is that the rights need to be explained more specifically.

Yeah.

And if there’s things happening there where money is due, then the money should be paid.

There you go.

That’s our position.

Well, the only thing I have to ask you about that is your — the first chapter of your book, Alphabet Juice, was published on the New York Times.

I can read that on my computer here.

I have my computer read it to me.

How is that accounted for?

I gave them that permission so that it would help sell the book.

I bet it did.

Well, probably.

I don’t know.

Who knows what helps sell books?

I’m here with Roy Blunt, Jr.

His book is Alphabet Juice.

This is almost a memoir.

You’ve written your notes and your stories and the things that have occurred to you about interesting words and plays on language.

A few anecdotes mixed it up with some ideas about the way language ought to be and the way it is, and it’s a great read.

One thing that struck me was under the entry for Can Can, Can Coon, and Coon Can, you have a story about George Plimpton, which I’d never heard before.

He had an interesting request for his memorial celebration.

He specified that after he died, he would like to have for his memorial Can Can dancers with no pants.

No underpants.

No underpants.

Did that happen?

No.

He had the Can Can dancers, but they had on pants.

At least the one, maybe there was a private one, I don’t know.

It’s probably illegal to dance the Can Can with no pants.

It probably is.

It probably happens here and there, but I’ve never seen it.

I’ve been to a few bars where it’s happened, yes.

Roy, I want to thank you for talking to us today.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

To find out more about Roy’s book, you can check us out on the discussion forum at waywordradio.org/discussion.

We’ll also link to Roy’s book, show you the first chapter, which is on the New York Times website, and we’ll link you to his homepage.

Thank you so much, Roy.

Thank you, Grant.

On our website at waywordradio.org, you can find more Minicast, news about language current events, and full episodes of our call-in show, all at no cost to you.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

Support for A Way with Words comes from Random House, publisher of Origins of the Specious, Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, by Patricia T. O’Connor and Stuart Kellerman. blank_audio