"The Grasshopper King"

I picked up this book mostly to pay tribute to Jordan Ellenberg for his chugging-1-gallon-milk-in-4-minutes feat as escabeche, but it's the finer points of the Gravinic language that keeps me turning the pages.

• Henderson had infiltrated the world's literature through the low cunning of coincidence.
• Translation of Henderson's response is "bastard" - but the English word fails to capture the specific connotation of a son who, not content with dishonoring his mother by his illegitimacy, rapes her upon achieving manhood and abandons her to the poverty of soiled women.
• (King) Listener was perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of his subjects; a single word, it was said, would suffice for any petition to him. (King) Speaker's gift was to issue royal decrees in language so stirring and precise that it was considered a privilege to obey them. 
• (Gravinic cases:) ... But then, too, there was the locative, the transformative, the restorative, the stative; the operative and its tricky counterpart, the cooperative; the justificative, the terminative, the reiterative, the extremely popular pejorative, the restive, the suggestive, the collective, the palliative, the argumentative, the supportive, the reclusive and the preclusive, the intuitive and the counter-intuitive...