Rick DeMarinis, who seems to have warmed his toes by the fires of James Crumley's gonzo genius, is one of that lonesome crowd of writers who love the language but aren't afraid to rough it up to save its life.
A Starbucks in a refurbished 19th-century building on the banks of the River Lee, which meanders though the city center, attracts a techie crowd of 20-something millennials, speaking languages as varied as Chinese and Czech.
The crowd erupted as it got Patrick's point about the power of language.
There he was on a recent afternoon, speaking in the indigenous Blackfoot language before a crowd of film industry executives, then posing for selfies at a bar across town on National Caesar Day, which celebrates a uniquely Canadian concoction that includes tomato juice, vodka, Worcestershire sauce and clam broth.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney denounced the recent campaign stops as dangerous and expressed alarm that the top of the Republican ticket would not protest the crowd's language.
At some 500 pages, the bill drew immediate fire from civil liberties groups – and the wrath of much of the online crowd – for burying language that gives the all-clear to the president's detaining of terror suspects indefinitely and without trial.
But in their different languages, before a crowd of journalists, cultural figures and various illustrious French expatriates breakfasting in a tent while a jazz band played, each proclaimed the bonds of trans-Atlantic friendship.
"We don't care if the candidates are politically correct, if they can say hello to a crowd of voters in a dozen Asian languages," Christine Chen, executive director of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said.
The growing crowds and open-air character of the occasion help to account for the ever-increasing grandiosity of language in inaugural addresses.
He, too, was speaking to a fevered crowd of cameras and microphones in his native language.
