He often finds the perfect words for things.
He summarizes the problem succinctly and exactly.
He points at the exact point of difficulty with startling accuracy.
He claims to not be “a WORDS guy” but I’ve never met anyone who says them better.
There are, though, several things he cannot find words for, or chooses not to. Perhaps they are blinds spots in a well said landscape.
It is mysterious.

I’m curious about how “marry” became this sort of word. What do we even call this kind of word? A stalling word, a connecting word, a word that adds rhythm without much meaning. Whatever we call them, they’re important words. I remember when I was first learning Italian. A friend taught me to say “Allora” so I’d have a word to think with – a word that would create space for me to work out the grammar of what I wanted to say – a word I could weight with exclamatory functions or simple place holding. The art history teacher used “quindi” in much the same way, but with her it was a vocal tic, one which we all could imitate, even with our rudimentary language skills.
Quindi wasn’t quite so successful a lingual breath. Can I call it that? Anyway, “Marry” seems like “Allora” or “Why” or “My” or “Well” – mostly like “well” I think – but how did it come to be so and then how did it fade away again?

To my ear, Polonius sounds a little bit like Bottom here
Perhaps it’s just the use of the word “marvelous” –
Bottom is marvelous hairy about the face.
Polonius suggests Reynaldo will do marvelous wisely
And in neither case, does marvelous sound particularly – um – smart.
They both use big words, for sure. Bottom a lot more inappropriately – but anyone aspiring to appear intellectual will make a many syllable mistake sometimes.
This, is not, I don’t think, a mistake
Just a sort of funky construction –
But it makes me consider
What would happen if the actor playing Polonius also played Bottom and brought a little of one to the other?

This scene is often cut. In Backwards and Forwards, David Ball explains why this is a mistake. While it’s true that no real action happens here, in it we see Polonius at his most devious, setting up a spy to get information about his son.
It’s important because its gives us insight into a character we might otherwise see as a sweet old man killed by our hero. I think that’s smart.
This is the first line in the first scene in the Act 2 and here we meet Reynaldo, who we will never see again and whose name shows up nowhere else in Shakespeare. It’s not a generic name. It seems important somehow.
Polonius will say it more than once.
He does not send Servant or Messenger to go seek out gossip about his son. He sends a character with a name and a unique one at that.
I have questions about Reynaldo. First, what sort of name is that? It’s not Italian. There is no Y in Italian but it sounds Italian. Perhaps it’s Spanish?
But again, I wonder: What are all these Latin folks doing in Elsinore?
Why is almost everyone in service Italian or Spanish or Portuguese? Time to go searching dissertations again. There must be one called The Latin Influence in Hamlet: An Historical Context of The Latin Presence in Shakespeare’s England and Denmark, too.

It’s the simplest of sentences that baffle me sometimes.
I could dismiss this little tag line with a blanket translation/assumption –
A sort of pat on the bottom and a bold,
“On your way then, champ!”
But come is different than go
Except when it isn’t
And why does she have WAYS, plural
And why are they hers? Especially after he’s been so prescriptive.
She’s only got one way
As he’s put it to her
And it’s not really hers.

I haven’t done the full research
But it seems to me the CHARGING in this play
Always centers around speaking and not speaking.
The ghost is charged to speak
Polonius charges Ophelia to cease speaking with Hamlet.
How many other things can human beings charge each other to do
Certainly we are full of actions we can be charged
To do
Or not do
But we get into so much more trouble with our words
To charge or uncharge them
May be the only thing we really feel we can control.

Polonius, laying down the law with his daughter with a pronouncement.
It sounds like a royal decree and one that could not possibly be ignored.
“From this time forth”
Takes us from weddings and religious decrees
As well as serious legislation.
I can see why Ophelia doesn’t bother to argue –
It would be like arguing with an earthquake
Or the wind
Or the will of a god.
He shifts the world here
From this time forth.

People always say they don’t want to be all things to all people
Or is it that you can’t be all things to all people?
Anyway – you can’t.
I thought I could when I was young. See, I was nice.
I had the signs from the Student of the Week exercise to prove it.
Emily is nice. Emily is nice. Emily is nice.
Repeated ad infinitum by almost every student who had been compelled to write
Something positive about me.
And it was true.
I was nice.
And I thought being nice
Would keep me safe.
I thought I would be nice
And always and forever
That would mean
I would be for all.
That the world around me could disagree about religion
And politics and fashion
But they would all agree
That I was nice.
I was for everybody.
When that illusion burst,
It was devastating at first.
All that adjusting to please everyone
To accommodate the world
To fit myself newly into each new frame
Was for naught. Really I could have been for only a few all along,
Not for all,
But for those more precisely more deeply more exactly more truly more my own self –
Not just nice.

Polonius, mixing his metaphors
Like a mad chef
With a metaphor cupboard
Slinging the ingredients together.
The money metaphor, the clothing metaphor, the religious, so artfully following
And blending one into the other, it’s hard to imagine them as separate ingredients –
Like he’s baked some bread
Such that you can’t tell what was milk
What was flour
What was yeast –
It’s just bread now.
But it’s a pretty hastily stirred batch of dough
And not quite up to Polonius’ normal rhetorical skill.
It feels like he’s casting about, searching
For the right way to sum up his instructions.
Money – yes. Brokers – no, dyes, no clothes, religious clothes, no, not religious,
Like religious – – – ah hell –
It’s like he’s too distraught to even pick a metaphor.
He gives up on them here and turns to plain terms.

This is the whole speech in one sentence.