The Beauty of Words

"When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain." - William Shakespeare 

(Wanderer Above The Sea Fog - 1818)

Words are Beautiful?

In the Victorian era denoted in Oliver Twist, we feel a sense of disdain towards the class based society, wherein the ego of man is in full effect. However, in this harsh Victorian era, literature and taste were the ideals by which the status quo manifested itself. And in so doing, literature became so fetishized, that the elitists and bourgeois became drunk with knowledge of the arts. 

Herein lies the beauty of words, in fact, words now became a commodity. For example, if a middle-class person said an academic word which was unintelligible to a working-class person, there was a sense of heightened pride and vanity in the use of the word. The same applies to the arts and sciences, or as  Pierre Bourdieu says, "Cultural Capital". Herein lies the beauty of words...the sublime pleasure of exclusion.