Bertie Wooster - Language and Inspiration

Language and Inspiration

With a single exception, all the Bertie Wooster stories are told in the first person by Bertie himself. Although Bertie himself is, as Jeeves puts it, "mentally negligible", his descriptive style employs a considerable facility with English. Bertie displays a fondness for pre-World War I slang, peppering his speech with words and phrases such as "What ho!", "pipped", "bally", and so on. He also commonly abbreviates words and phrases, such as "eggs and b." As the years pass, popular references from film and literature would also feature in his narratives. Bertie has some linguistic quirks that continue through almost all of his stories. For example, he almost never uses the word "walk" but uses words like "oil", "stagger", "shimmer" and "ankle".

The Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy believes George Grossmith, Jr. to have been the inspiration for Bertie Wooster.