While New York has contributed to the American language such joyous words as "whoopee" and "hot dog," Washington has coined "inside the Beltway" and "Department of Homeland Security".
Even though the text elements of the story are short, there's a joyous celebration of language within it.
(In Eddie@90, Catherine Lockerbie describes the same experience – the sheer beauty of the book, its coloured pages, the joyous explosion of language).
We can only celebrate the fact that Big Publishing has seen in this work and this poet the same conflagration of genius so many of us in the other 99% of the country have consistently and invariably seen; and we can only ardently wish that, in the future, work of such vision and joyous facility with language will continue to emanate from the usually-provincial seats of the Five Boroughs.
At such joyous times, Nana's unprintable language is suddenly purposeful.
The result -- a joyous noise, a distinctive clamor, a common language spoken by a tribe that perfectly understood one another's blasts and toots.
They're "bits and bobs," he writes, but he takes them more seriously than that, and so should anyone who cares about joyous, wriggling sentences composed in the English language.
The generation of the ego out of expulsion, the division of unity, is not simply a mournful moment, but also potentially a joyous one, in which the advent of language, the promise of the father, offers reparation and life with a world of others, so that words can provide the nourishment that the breast previously had.
Although Johnson did not start his literary criticism career until later, London is an example of what Johnson thought poetry should be: it is youthful and joyous, but it also relies on simple language and easy to understand imagery.
The book is a joyous and unexpected intellectual journey through the strange interaction between language and the world that language attempts to describe.
