Words, Words, Words

Witty and stylish essays on the oddities and beauties of the English language; on the greatness of Samuel Johnson; on the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse; on the delights of retirement; on writers savaging other writers; on euphemistic cursing; on strange word origins; on mathematical language; on the majesty of the Irish Literary Renaissance and the power of the Southern American Renascence-on James Joyce, John Millington Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, and on Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Faulkner; poems of love, nature, and comedy.