He was, most of all, a man of words, spoken and written. Arisen from comic-book and popular song worlds with epiphanies of the possibilities of poetry and Roget’s Thesaurus (1962) thrown in some ten years later.
Through long-term serious reading and teaching, an ever-growing awareness of words as conciseness, practicality, nuance, irony, humour, associativeness, connectedness, and words as ‘basic usage’ via sound, meaning, ideas, and consciousness.
On the home stretch, there was nothing but comprehensiveness, integrity, richness, complexity, intensity, unlimited discriminations, great depths of beauty and truth, considerable knowledge and wisdom, in addition to innumerable, unexpected possibilities of infinite or transcendent kinds.