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.
Read more about this topic: Bertie Wooster
Famous quotes containing the words language and, language and/or inspiration:
“...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“This Light inspires, and plays upon
The nose of Saint like Bag-pipe drone,
And speaks through hollow empty Soul,
As through a Trunk, or whisp’ring hole,
Such language as no mortal Ear
But spiritual Eve-droppers can hear.”
—Samuel Butler (1612–1680)
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)