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.
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Famous quotes containing the words language and/or inspiration:
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)