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:
“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
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“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.”
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