At the Lion's Head as well as at the Poetry Project, Joel was famous for his word usage, spellings, and grammatical corrections of either young poets or seasoned journalists. Not surprisingly then in the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the fourth example of the slang-word hype has a citation from Joel Oppenheimer.

4. Something deliberately misleading; a deception: "[He] says that there isn't any energy crisis at all, that it's all a hype, to maintain outrageous profits for the oil companies" (Joel Oppenheimer)

In his essay on bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt observes that humbug is just another word for his subject of bullshit. I think that "hype" is just another word for bullshit, too. How apt then that the dictionary would choose an example from that least of humbugs, Joel Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's last wife Theresa Maier noted that—

Joel had a firm belief in words. Words don't lie. It was an axiom. In culture like ours, it seemed like such a silly throw away line to me. Of course words lie. We are lied to all the time. Joel was a purist. The agent lies. The words never do. And he showed great care about that. But he meant more by that line than that. He also saw words, and their etymology as an opening into history. Shifts in a word showed shifts in the world. The fun he had in tracing roots, in his poem "Greens," or his "Chemo" poem. Building connections.

Maier goes on to say:

Joel's words reflected his world. His poetry allowed a reader to penetrate it. And just when you thought you were merely a voyeur, the son of a bitch drew you into your own world. It is pretty rare to find that. His purpose for writing was about connection. And not to him, his open field connects us to heart and history, and what it feels like to be human.

M.G. Stephens is the author of eighteen books, including the novels The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole; the play Our Father, which was revived last year in London; and the nonfiction books Lost in Seoul, Green Dreams, and Where the Sky Ends. Mick lives in London, is the director of the MA in creative writing at Kingston University in Surrey, England, and is finishing up a PhD thesis on the St. Mark's in the Bowery Poetry Project and its influences at the University of Essex in Colchester, England. His essay is drawn from that thesis. Some of his other recent work includes essays and stories in Witness, Boston Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Foreign Policy. He recently completed the third novel in the Coole family saga, this new one called Kid Coole, and has been writing a book of sonnets for several years now, as well as writing a nonfiction book about living in England after 9/11, and also surviving one of the tube explosions on July 7th this year, being on the train in front of where the Edgware Road bomb went off.