Yes!

This blog is all about the word YES. I received a poem for a childhood neighbor/friend/dear one that used the word YES often and it got me thinking about how important this word is. I don't think I hear it enough, so I want more! Yes yes yes! And why not?

From Wikipedia:

Perhaps the most famous "yes" in literature comes from Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which is the concluding "Penelope" chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses. In this chapter, Joyce uses Molly Bloom's "yes" as a sort of refrain in a very long stream of consciousness sentence. The chapter both begins,

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the CITY ARMS hotel. . .

and ends:

. . . yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

with the word yes.

When John Lennon met Yoko Ono, one of the first works by Ono that captured Lennon's attention was a large canvas which viewers were invited to inspect by a glass, through which they could read the single word "Yes" written on it.

Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton wrote a famous self-help book about negotiation and salesmanship called Getting to YES. This book has sold more than 2 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. By contrast, a yes-man is a sycophant or a toady; this word is used in business circles to identify people who enthusiastically endorse everything their superiors propose in order to curry favor with them. The turn of phrase is an old one; in Latin, a today was called babaecalus, someone who cried "Bravo" (Latin babae) to everything their superior did.But Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls himself a yes-sayer, with somewhat more positive intent:

I, however, am a blesser and a Yes-sayer, if you be but around me, you pure, you luminous heaven! you abyss of light!- into all abysses do I then carry my beneficent Yes-saying.

A blesser have I become and a Yes-sayer: and therefore strove I long and was a striver, that I might one day get my hands free for blessing.