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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 428.1 Merritt | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | 428.1 Merritt 2014 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The country folk say "howdy-do" but here in town, it's "yo"; they'll say it in the country too in twenty years or so.Rolling Stone magazine has called songwriter Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields "the Cole Porter of his generation"; O, The Oprah Magazine has hailed cartoonist Roz Chast as "the wryest pen since Dorothy Parker's." Together they have crafted a witty book in celebration of two-letter words, focusing on the 101 such words that count in Scrabble. Featuring four-line poems by Merritt and colour illustrations by Chast, 101 Two-Letter Words covers familiar words (go, hi, no, ox) as well as obscure ones (ka, oe, qi, xu). With dark wit and clever wordplay, it will delight, not just Scrabble players and crossword puzzle fanatics, but anyone in thrall to the weirdest corners of the English language.
Author Notes
With the Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt has written, produced, and recorded ten albums, including 69 Love Songs, which was named one of the 500 best albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Merritt has performed as part of Lincoln Center's "American Songwriters" series and at BAM's "Next Wave of Song," and he has composed the score for the Academy Award-nominated film Pieces of April and for Eban and Charley.
Roz Chast has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1978. Her cartoons have been collected in What I Hate, Theories of Everything, and The Party After You Left. She also illustrated The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter Z, the best-selling children's book by Steve Martin. Her most recent book is Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about her parents.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
From aa to zz, a compendium of curious words.Scrabble enthusiast Merritt, songwriter and singer in the Magnetic Fields, had trouble remembering all the two-letter words so useful for the game. Making up rhymes helped, and before long, he had written poems for the 101 two-letter words allowed in the Scrabble dictionary. Illustrated by longtimeNew Yorkercartoonist Chast (Cant We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir, 2014, etc.), Merritts literary debut is sly, silly and playfully absurd. Even a common word like is inspires Merritt to flights of poetic fancy: Is You Is or Is You Aint / My Baby; sold a million, / and not by being played at any / debutantes cotillion. For the esoteric word os, Chasts rendering of an animated landscape accompanies this ditty: Os: a spine of gravel dropped / by long-gone giggly glaciers / playing in their sandbox, leaving / scribbles and erasures. Merritts Scrabble dictionary apparently includes cockney (Oi, meaning hey there), Scottish (Ae means one, Bo means friend), Egyptian (ba represents the soul), archaic spelling variations (wo for woe) and slang abbreviations (bi for bisexual). Merritt sometimes reaches for the unexpected meaning of a word: The common verb go becomes, instead, a noun: Go: a subtle game of skill, / with stones of black and white. / One game can go on until / the middle of the night. Chast aptly captures the mood of the rhymes with her characteristic unkempt, harried and often bewildered characters, both human and animal. For Id: the source of primal drives, her bug-eyed green monster is appropriately lustful; her rendering of Santa Claus ( Ho, ho, ho says old Saint Nick) makes him look a bit debauched.Any readers vocabulary is likely to grow after reading Merritts quirky wordplay, but edification is not the point; fun is, and Merritt and Chast deliver just that. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.