Two contributors to American Speech. One claims to have often heard you-all “used in speaking to one person” as a plural in the Ozarks, the other to have heard it used “again and again … in speaking to one person.” As we have seen in our BP example, the use of you-all in speaking to one person does not mean that it refers to only one person. Also you will note that all these authorities on you-all have heard it used. Everyone I have ever discussed this with, who used you-all, has confirmed that they meant it, and that other people who use you-all understood it, to be plural. Sometimes not obviously plural, as in our BP example, but you-all is not singular.
You say to me that OED is a higher authority than I am. I say to you goodness gracious yes; but not in every, particularly American, particular. For instance:
OED says the verb bloop means, in baseball, “To score (a run or runs) by hitting the ball just beyond the reach of the infield.” I guess that gets the trajectory of a bloop right, if by “beyond” is meant over, but I’m bothered by the implication that anyone is likely to bloop on purpose; and the part about runs is dead wrong—also wrong under the noun bloop, where OED takes a bloop single (the noun used attributively) to mean a single run scored by a bloop. A bloop single is just a one-base hit. In cricket, a single is a hit that scores a run, but in baseball (as OED says correctly under single) it just gets the batter on base.
OED defines triple play correctly, but double play inadequately, as a play “in which two runners are put out successively by throws of the basemen.” A double play may involve other fielders than basemen—or just one fielder, unassisted, with no throws.
By way of defining hit and run, in baseball, OED quotes from D.A., which turns out to be short for Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1951, whose definition of hit and run was way out of date then and by a century or so now: “A play wherein a base runner starts with the pitcher’s throw as the batter attempts a hit, a sacrifice hit.” No sacrifice is involved in a post-1910-or-so hit and run—ideally, the runner draws the shortstop or second baseman over to the base and the batter places a hit through the resultant hole.
According to OED, a field goal in American football is “a goal scored from the field of play.” Where else would you score a goal from? A field goal is a three-point goal made by kicking. OED’s definitions of safety and touchdown, in American football, and sacrifice fly, in baseball, are not right either.
And to all of you who insist to me that you have personally heard someone in the South use y’all as a singular, I say that is like telling me that the South has mice that are over five feet tall, because you saw one at Disney World.
See y’all.
z · Z · z
“In southern Ontario,” according to the linguist J. K. Chambers, “the pronunciation of Z as zee is stigmatized, as might be expected. American immigrants to the region … routinely report that their name for Z is one of the first things they change after arriving there, because calling it zee unfailingly draws comments from the people they are talking to.” Canadians have expressed resentment that Sesame Street’s rhyming zee is poisoning the zed’s of our neighbor to the north’s innocent children.
It is true that zed is standard in every English-speaking country besides the United States, and that it has an old-world pedigree: from the French zède, from the Greek zeta. But the French don’t say bède nor the English bed for b, which derives from beta. I can’t see anything particularly to be cherished about zed, except that it brings the alphabet to a halt better than open-ended zee. In support of zee, we can point out that it rhymes with b, c, d, e, g, p, t, and v.
OED cites Edward Augustus Freeman, the English author of Some Impressions of the United States, as having reported, in 1893, that “the name … given to the last letter of the alphabet … in New England is always zee; in the South it is zed.” I was not around in 1893, but I have never heard tell of zed’s ever having had any currency in the American South. (As in ZedZed Top? E-Zed Rollers?) Maybe Freeman heard an Anglophile in Charleston, South Carolina, say zed, or he heard someone call someone Zed, short for Zedekiah, a biblical name. (Yes, the creep in Pulp Fiction who rapes the Ving Rhames character, who in turn shotguns him fatally in the groin thanks to the intervention of the Bruce Willis character, is named Zed.) Beware of English people’s impressions of American English (see you-all and, in Alphabet Juice, y’all). But Freeman goes on genially to suggest a third way: that z be pronounced neither zed nor zee, but rather ez, by analogy with l, m, n, and s.
I did a Google Book Search for “zed in America” and found a volume printed in London in 1860, Notes and Queries: A Medium of InterCommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. I take it to be a semiannual compilation from a weekly magazine of academic correspondence—the Victorian equivalent of an Internet chat site. John Camden Hotter, of Picadilly, writes: “We pronounce the last letter of our alphabet zed; in America it is universally termed ze.” That seems right, if a bit skimpy on e’s. Hotter, who says he has returned from teaching school in the United States, adds: “A million spelling-books in America has it ze, whilst perhaps another million here has it zed.”
From Hotter’s has’s, we might conclude that for literate nineteenth-century Picadillians, spelling-books was singular. (Compare you-all.) Perhaps the subject is construed as “a million of spelling-books.” Would Hotter have written “a thousand [of] years has passed” or “a dozen [of] eggs has been laid”? Too late, now, to write in and find out.
zeroth
“Coming next in a series before the one conventionally regarded as the first,” says OED.
So if your first and present wife finds out you were married before, that would be known thereafter as your zeroth marriage, you hope.
If there are two strikes against you and no balls, and the pitcher is throwing ninety-nine miles an hour, home plate may feel like zeroth base.
Or say a long-suppressed amendment to the U.S. Constitution is in danger of being discovered. That amendment was in fact the first one approved by the Congress. That amendment stated, “By the expression the people hereinthroughout is meant white men of property.” But then Jefferson, who had written it, got up and said, “No, seriously, gentlemen, it goes without saying. Let’s start with freedom of speech and so on,” and everybody laughed and acknowledged it a goodly jest. Then that (and the Dan Brown novel about it) would be known as the Zeroth Amendment.
zest, zester
The other evening my wife showed me an instrument she had just acquired: “I’ve got a zester,” she said. “I didn’t know there were zesters, and now I have one.”
She spoke zestfully. It was a nice moment, and it’s a nice device, especially designed for the scraping of zest from citrus rinds.
Zest was defined in 1674 by Thomas Blount in his Glossographia: “the pill [peel] of an Orange, or such like, squeesed into a glass of wine, to give it a relish.” Squeeze, to use the modern spelling of the same sound, is an aptly sonicky word. One test of sonickiness is, can the word be pronounced exaggeratedly to evoke its meaning more thoroughly—perhaps as the voice-over accompanying a more literal, that is to say more bodily, expression: “Come here you sweet thing and let me give you the biggest ssqwweeeeezzze!”
“Enough! I can’t breathe!”
The original, now obsolete, word was quease. (Not related etymologically to queasy, apparently, though one wonders.) The initial s intensifies, sets up, prolongs the squeeze.
Zest is a quicker word for a brisker action. OED’s second citation, after Blount, is from a 1712 history of drugs: “Citron Oil … is made … by the Zest or the rasping or grating of the Citron Peel.”
Origin is obscure, says OED. Hendrickson says French zeste may come from Latin scistus, meaning cut. The z sound suggests friction, as in the sound of an electric shaver hitting whiskers, and -est is superlative. At any rate zest is firmly rooted in physicality and orality, having referred first to citrus essence, then to general spicing up of food and drink,
then generally to “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action” (OED).
See vim.
zizz
A rare case of a one-syllable contradiction in terms: OED says zizz can mean “gaiety, liveliness, ‘sparkle’” or, on the other hand, a nap. The first meaning uses the z sound as pizazz, sizzle, and whiz do. The second uses it to evoke sawing logs. On Z as an only indirect representation of snoring, see Alphabet Juice. Come to think of it, Z evokes sawing visually, not just because of its cartoon associations, but in its shape.
zolotnik
An old Russian unit of weight. Ninety-six of them made up a funt, which was 14.4 ounces, so a zolotnik was roughly a sixth of an ounce. Crazy Russians! But zolotnik is cognate with the Polish monetary unit zloty, each coming from the respective language’s word for gold.
And funt is related to German Pfund and English pound. Here’s how that went down: Germanic people, in trading with Latin speakers, took the pondo in Latin libra pondo to be the monetary unit, when it fact the pondo meant “by weight,” the libra being the unit. It’s as if you were to take the weight in “thirty-weight oil” to be the measurement, so that when someone at the gas station asked you what weight oil you wanted, you said, “Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘Yes’? What weight?”
“Weight weight.”
Or it’s sort of as if that. (Maybe it would be clearer if we use as an example a ten-penny nail. Or would have been clearer if we had; I don’t think either one of us wants to go back through that.) OED says libra pondo meant “pound by weight,” but wait. It meant “libra by weight.” Since libra is from the Latin for scales, you can see why the Goths, or whoever they were, were confused.
Perhaps it was when some Roman slave, or some Latin scholar, said, “No, wait, excuse me—you’ve got this wrong-end-to.”
“What do you mean, ‘No weight?’”
“What? Oh, no, I meant ‘No, wait as in w-a-i-t wait.’”
The Goth is losing interest.
“Forget that. My point is, pondo is not the unit; libra is the unit”—perhaps that’s when lb was adopted as the abbreviation for pound, and a cursive L with a little line through it for the monetary pound (originally, a poundweight of silver). So British authorities could say, “The libra is there, it’s just silent. It’s understood.” The little line was added after people got confused, thought they were just looking at an L.
So let’s not be so quick to say, “Crazy Russians!”
Scale, by the way, is related to shell and skoal. Originally meaning cup, it was extended to the little pans of the early balancing mechanism used to weigh things.
zwischenzug
An interim or temporizing move, in chess. And in this book, while I’m trying to come up with just the right word to go out on.
Zydeco
Danceable Creole-Cajun hybrid music, from les haricots, the beans, from the song, “Les Haricots Sont Pas Salés,” which means the beans aren’t dirty. Nick Spitzer, who knows, spells it zodico, presumably pronounced zoddico, which would fit the a involved in a Creole or Cajun (or anybody else’s) pronunciation of les haricots better, but Zydeco, for some reason always capitalized, is established.
zythum
A beer. Why not end our session here with a beer? Zythum, we are told, was an ancient Egyptian beer brewed from malt and wheat, no hops.
OED: “Much of the word’s continuing use is due to its status as the last word listed in several dictionaries.” Including OED.
We should’ve let Zydeco play us on off.
But hop is an interesting word, in any number of connections. Hops in basketball means jumping ability. Hopped up is an old reference to opium. Between hops is a baseball term of potentially broad application. (You don’t want your sentences to catch people between hops.) And how about the simple bunny-associated verb, which goes back at least to around the year 1000: “To spring a short way upon the ground or any surface with an elastic or bounding movement, or a succession of such movements: said of persons, animals, and things. Formerly a general synonym of leap; now implying a short or undignified leap” (OED). Oh, man, can OED define a word? (See “Is the pope fallible?,” alternatives to.) But enough. Here’s hopping we meet now and then, maybe in Alphabest Juice.
See jump.
Also by Roy Blount Jr.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!
Alphabet Juice
Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South
Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans
I Am the Cat, Don’t Forget That (with Valerie Shaff)
Robert E. Lee: A Life
Am I Pig Enough for You Yet? (with Valerie Shaff)
I Am Puppy, Hear Me Yap (with Valerie Shaff)
If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You (with Valerie Shaff)
Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story
Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor (editor)
Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard
First Hubby
About Three Bricks Shy … and the Load Filled Up
Now, Where Were We?
Soupsongs/ Webster’s Ark
It Grows on You: A Hair-Raising Survey of Human Plumage
What Men Don’t Tell Women
Not Exactly What I Had in Mind
One Fell Soup
Crackers
About Three Bricks Shy of a Load
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my editor, Sarah Crichton; my production editor, Chris Peterson; and my copy editor, Cynthia Merman, for their meticulous (no comma here) sweet perusal.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-two previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to Duck Soup to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.
Copyright © 2011 by Roy Blount Jr.
All rights reserved
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Ralph Fowler / rlfdesign
eISBN 9781429922784
First eBook Edition : April 2011
First edition, 2011
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “An Old Joke” from Twigs & Knucklebones by Sarah Lindsay, copyright © 2008 by Sarah Lindsay. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blount, Roy.
Alphabetter juice : or, the joy of text / Roy Blount.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Sarah Crichton books.”
1. Vocabulary—Humor. 2. English language—Dictionaries—Humor. I. Title.
PN6231.W64 B49 2011
818’.5407—dc22
2010039937
Alphabetter Juice Page 31