What I’m Reading: Sandlin, Stephenson, Šipka, and more

Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin

When Eliza Kratke arrived home one die, she finds her husband, a railroad man, clutching his chest near his car. After a harrowing car ride to the hospital, he dies. Then it turns out that he has been living a double life and has drained their accounts to support a second wife. Eliza’s 30-year marriage is over and she’s determined to make her own way, selling her possessions, renting out her house, and rebuilding her life. She moves to a low rent motel called the Sweet Vidalia Residence Inn, which will take her dogs as well, and enrolls in business college, becoming a stand in mom for a cast of neighbors and fellow students. It’s a briskly-paced tale of a woman for doesn’t just cope when her life is turned up-side down, but finds her true strengths and thrives. Sweet Vidalia a coming-of-age-novel about a woman in her fifties, with engaging characters, crackling dialog, and a protagonist you won’t forget.

We’re all suspects on this Train by Brian Stephenson

An homage of sorts to Murder on the Orient Express, Stephenson’s novel is set on an mystery book festival that takes place on a train travelling across the Australian outback, where struggling writer Ernest Cunningham is working on his second book, a sequel to his (and Stephenson’s) Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. As luck would have it, one of the writers, a surly drunk, winds up dead, and Ernest and the others investigate. It’s partly a send up of publishing and full of mystery novel tropes which Ernest invokes as metacommentary as he tells the story. There’s both direction and misdirection and plenty of fun. I’m going back to read Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone.

Water, Whiskey, and Vodka by Danko Šipka

Šipka’s book is an introduction to Slavic linguistics for general readers, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But the book is as accessible as possible requiring a minimum of background in linguistics or Slavic languages (but some). Šipka’s treats the history of the Slavic languages, from Indo-European fotward, the sound system, including the complex palatalizations and yer-vowels, morphology, borrowing from language to language, literacy, orthography., and more. There is even a chapter on celebrity Slavic linguists. In the chapter on “language wars,” the author steers clear of the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian though he gets into some of the other political issues of language and identity. As for the titular water, whiskey, and vodka, in case you were wondering, refers to the etymological connections among the three. All are from the Indo-European root. You can raise a glass to Šipka’s story of the Slavic languages.

The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon

I grew up hearing references to the missing Judge Crater (mostly, I think, in comic strips—he was the Jimmy Hoffa of his day). Ariel Lawhon offers a fictional retelling of Crater’s disappearance, with prominent roles to a trio of women: his long-suffering spouse Stella, his mistress Ritzi, and the Craters’ maid Maria, who is the wife of a police detective and has a second job as a seamstress. There are gangsters, crooked politicians, crooked cops, and showgirls. Lawhon builds the story by tacking back and between the present and past events, keeping the reader a bit off balance. In the present days, Crater’s widow Stella is finally revealing the whole story to retired detective Jude Simon, Maria’s widower. In the past narrations, we get the story though the eyes of Stella, Maria, and Ritzi. An engaging bit of historical fiction, but I was a bit underwhelmed at the ending.

Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

It’s starts with a contentious dinner party interrupted by house exploding down the block. Sarah Tucker, a young housewife who is bored and at loose ends as a wife, becomes obsessed with the missing child who survived the attack. With the help of a local private detective she sets out to find the missing girl, running into roadblocks and cover ups. When the detective is killed, she joins force with a mysterious Eventually she joins force with a mysterious ex-military man dying after being exposed to secret military testing, and the two of them, together with the detective’s partner, track down the girl. It was a good story, but I was hoping for something a bit more in the vein of the Slough House series, though Gerard Inchon, the unlikable client of Sarah’s feckless husband, feels like a prototype for Jackson Lamb. I’ll continue the series, but won’t rush off to buy them.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle

This was a bit of a disappointment, except pt for some of the dialogue. The satire seemed a bit over the top. A bear finds a novel buried in the woods by a hapless English professor and passes it off as his own, creating the persona Hal Jam and getting an agent and publisher and the attention of Hollywood. The professor meanwhile hibernates in the Maine woods, eventually emerging to sue to reclaim his work. I got a bit bored with it but it reminded me of the later novels, The Plot (and its sequel The Sequel) as well as Yellowface.

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An Interview with Michael Erard, author of Bye, Bye, I Love You

Michael Erard

For the last five years, writer Michael Erard has been working on a book about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying. His latest book Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, published by MIT Press (February 2025) offers a cultural history of both phenomena, bringing them together in a way that sheds new light on two important cultural rites. His work has been supported in part by the Max Planck Society, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a Public Scholars Fellowship in 2022.

Michael Erard has an MA in linguistics and a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has worked as a senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute, where he helped create a method for designing and testing metaphors for use in strategic communications. In 2017, he was the first-ever writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and is now a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Erard is the author of Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon; 2007), and Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press; 2012. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon, The New York Times, New Scientist, Science, Down East, the European Review of Books, the North American Review, Texas Observer, and other magazines.

He lives in the Netherlands.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed Bye Bye I Love You, and the way that you linked the two phenomena. How did you first make the connection of studying first and last words together?

Michael Erard: The seed was holding my first child and observing him explore the world with his voice for the first time, while realizing that my linguistic powers were certainly fading. There’s also the way that his first words implied his last ones–all of the things of new life, including early communication behavior, serve as memento mori. Maybe that’s an unusual response, but for me it felt veyr natural.

I was also intensely aware that for all of my interest and attention to his early vocal explorations, I wasn’t going to witness his final ones, at least if things went conventionally the way that we hope.

EB: Are children first words always words, in the traditional sense? Are the last words always words?

ME: Their first words aren’t always adult-like forms. Sometimes they’re idiosyncratic productions that still capture an important feature of wordness: that they mean something, and that meaning is independent of a context. I would call those words. Other linguists haven’t wanted to.

And a last word, meaning a “final articulation of consciousness,” aren’t always words–they can be exclamations or interjections, as well as hand gestures, facial expressions, and even silence.

EB: Early on you say that first words are “interpersonal artifacts” (p 25). What do you mean by that?

ME: I mean they are artifacts of relationships and the slices of time in which they occur. Words don’t just happen–we produce them for each other, to each other. There is a way that the “first word” is a monumental thing, happening outside of relationship and circumstance, put on a pedestal and sent around on social media. But the first word is deeply relational. (There is always someone out there who wants to bring up talking to one’s self, or inner voices, or praying, in order to show that words do happen outside of social interaction, but I think we can agree that those are peripheral cases.)

EB: You mention your son’s first word. What was that? Did it seem important at the time?

ME: The thing we call his first word is “round-round,” which he used to describe a ceiling fan. It was immensely important at the time because it resolved itself out of his babbling. Which is to say, he was vocalizing repeatedly, then my attention shifted a bit, which is when I realized he was trying to tell me something. I repeated the word, and he responded happily to my recognition.

So not only was there a phonological form, semantic coherence, and symbolic autonomy (three criteria of wordness set out by the linguist Lise Menn), but there was a mutual recognition by him and me that some threshold had been crossed.

However, as I wrote in the book, there were some earlier productions that should have qualified, such as this utterance “ka” that he always used to say, while pointing to something he found interesting. We puzzled for a long time about what it was. It seemed important but we couldn’t figure out how.

EB: When did American culture start getting so interested in—or anxious about–first words? It seems to be somewhat culture specific.

ME: It started in the late 19th century and the emergence of “scientific motherhood,” the idea that mothers could be enlisted to observe their babies in order to track their developmental progress. That’s when commercial baby books, many of which had spaces to write first words, became popular. It really takes off in the period where doctors, psychologists, and parenting experts are telling parents what to pay attention to.

EB: I had never heard of the Roman god Farinus, the god of first words. What did the Romans think of first words?

ME: The Romans must have thought they were pretty important, but they credited Farinus for instilling a certain style or spirit to a baby’s language, as opposed to a specific word or phrase. I was disappointed that no statue or depiction of Farinus exists, but I was excited to find out that the ancients cared enough about child language to celebrate it this way.

EB: You discuss the ways in which the reception of both first and last words in western societies has become less ritualistic and more sincere. Why has that occurred?

ME: I argue that it’s because societies have become more individualistic, and there’s no better way to mark the unique existence of a person than through their own specific first word and some singular final utterance. Here “sincere” references the truth of reality, the way things actually are. So a sincere first word is what the baby really says, not what a parent’s cultural overlay is.

EB: What would a linguistics of last words look like?

ME: It begins first of all with an ethics of care–it’s not extractive or exploitative. It also engages with the notion that dying is a social and physical process that everyone will go through, though we will bring all aspects of our racialized, enculturated, and gendered lives to the experience.

It understands the language at the end of life in terms of interaction and multimodality, and it engages with the idea that we come to our dying as embodied selves and enculturated organisms. So in the same way that child language studies tries to comb apart the self and the organism and determine which contributes to developmental outcomes, a linguistics of the end of life would help us understand what is happening both in terms of cultural expectations and the physiological and cognitive realities of dying. It would deal frontally with the challenge of what disability studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls “normal impairment.”

It has to take into account the experiences of signers as well as talkers, and the experiences of multilinguals as well.

EB: What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?

ME: Keeping from generalisations that were too broad for the evidence that I had and worried that I had generalised anyway. From time to time I encountered a story about a death that was incredibly moving, but the immersion in the death literature wasn’t challenging in itself. As I write in the book, another seed was trying to cope with finding human remains, which sent me to the anthropology of death and dying. So I had been immersed in that for years before I began writing about language at the end of life specifically.

EB: What was the research like for this book? It seems that you’ve consulted a number of sources, archives, and little-known historical studies and a wide range of interviews. How did you find your way through the material?

ME: Once I had the basic framework about the four styles of first words, and once I had the phenomena described iin the Osler study, it became fairly easy to organize searches and go looking for materials that would fill the holes. I lucked into the archival sources and know there’s potentially much more out there to consider.

EB: What are your hopes for this book and your potential audience?

ME: I hope that the book gives people permission to re-narrate their personal stories around these linguistic milestones. I also hope it helps people to see that their cultural models around early language and language at the end of life may not contribute as positively as they think. This is especially the case with language at the end of life, where there seems to be a persistent notion that we retain our linguistic powers all the way to the last breath, which just isn’t the norm. There is also a fantasy that being present at someone’s final moment is somehow required, but in terms of bereavement outcomes, that’s not the case. So I hope the book gives people a simple idea about what language at the end of life is actually like, in the same way they have a basic idea of what babies’ language is like.

EB: I spend a bit of time overthinking your title. Did you intend “Bye Bye I Love You” as both first and last words?

ME: Me too! It’s a very challenging book to title! I actually chose one phrase as a first word and the other as a last word, but perhaps not the way you think. “Bye-bye” has been documented as a frequent first word (or one of ten first words) by English-speaking babies, and “I love you” is a frequent last word, in both anticipated and unanticipated deaths.

EB: Thanks for talking with me. Good luck with Bye Bye I Love you. It was a terrific read.

ME: Thanks!

 

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Review of The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum

The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum (Polity Press, 2024)

Many years ago, I took a freshman course called English Grammar, taught by the Renaissance scholar Bridget Gellert Lyons. In that class, we read A Short Introduction to English Grammar by James Sledd. Sledd’s book was a tough-minded introduction to structural linguistics and its application to English grammar. It had the misfortune of arriving just a structural linguistics was being eclipsed by generative grammar so it may never have gotten the acclaim it is due, but it is one of the few books from my undergraduate days that I’ve still got with me. And now standing next to “the Sledd” (as Bridgette Gellert Lyons referred to it) is Geoffrey Pullum’s The Truth About English Grammar.

Pullum gives a breezy and readable survey of English grammar in 18 short chapters. His terminology follows the excellent, comprehensive Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Pullum. That book weighs in at 1860 pages. The Truth About English Grammar, at just 189 pages, is just the thing for those who prefer something more concise.

After a few preliminaries, Pullum gets right to categories (words, sentences, nouns, verbs , determinatives, adjective, adverbs, etc. ), moving on to types of clause (content, relative, passive) and finishing up with Mythical Grammar Errors, and discussions of Spelling and Pronunciation, and Style. Pullum is remarkably concise, getting to the point of such complexities as when you can drop that subordinator that or how fewer and less actually work with a minimum of fuss or confusion.

He follows Occam’s Razor in deciding what fits into which categories and he is relentless about maintaining the distinction between categories and functions (things are thus “modifiers” or “adjuncts” rather than adjectivals or adverbials, and “content clauses” rather than “noun clauses”). His exposition is uncluttered with theory and he does as well as humanly possible to avoid the terminological clutter that sometimes arises when linguists try to explain English grammar.

Some of his conclusions will surprise readers who only learned traditional grammar (such as the status of words like before, after, and because when they introduce clauses). But his analyses are well-justified and it may be that there are so few people today who are wedded to fusty traditionalism that this is not something to worry about.

Pullum rounds out the book with a selection of sources for Further Reading, and a useful glossary. The Further Reading includes Disrecommendations—a handful of books which are “clueless about grammar, dogmatic in tone, and absurdly out of date.” The Glossary gives definitions of most of the terms an concepts in the book (omitting for some reason “adjunct” and “supplement,” which are described in pages 14 and 15.)

The discussion of Mythical Errors covers some of the usual suspects—who and whom, I versus me, like, split infinitives, sentence-initial conjunctions, and “the moral panic” about modal adjuncts (as he calls the much maligned hopefully), and more. He weighs in on singular they and the “befuddled dimwits” who object to it. He digs into the origins of such myths and time after time shows that the case that traditionalists who promote them simply ignore the evidence of how English works.

Even experienced grammarians will take things away from Pullum’s book: I learned for, example, a new diagnostic for telling whether something is a preposition or not (it can be preceded by the word right) and I discovered that the noun midst can neither be classified as a mass noun nor a count noun. And I learned something new about the who/whom choice in sentences like We’re talking about someone ___ everyone agrees is qualified. Is it who (who is qualified) or whom (we are talking about)? You’ll find his solution on page 127. And Pullum’s brief chapter on Style makes the clever point that so-called dangling modifiers are a “failure of empathy” rather than grammar: the writer fails to take into account how a reader will process something like “Being six-feet tall, the box was easy for Justin to reach” (p 168).

James Sledd intended his book to be “aimed at people who have no prior experience with grammar but would like a modest-sized introduction to it that makes sense.” The same can be said for The Truth About English Grammar. It deserves a wide audience.

 

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What I’m Reading: Mosley, Kuang, Gladwell

Farewell, Amethystine by Walter Mosely

By my count, Walter Mosely has written 17 Easy Rawlins mysteries (and another 15 featuring Socrates Fortlow, Leonid McGill, King Oliver and Fearless Jones). I try to read them all though may have missed a few of the recent ones. In any case I’m back and so is Easy, smitten with the young women called Amethystine (who fortunately goes by Amy).

It’s the beginning of January 1970 and Easy has a nice life and a good business. It’s all upset by Amethystine Stoller, who asks him to find her ex-husband Curt. Curt turns up dead and Easy goes about untangling that crime and several others, including one targeting his LAPD friend Mel Suggs.

In this tale, Easy is caught in the middle, between the comfortable life he is building, the still vulnerable present, and his past. Excellent dialogue and style, and Fearless Jones plays a supporting role.

Babel by R. F. Kuang

Babel is the story of a biracial youth—Robin Swift–who’s caught between the British Empire, which will educate at its Oxford Translation Cetner (the titular Babel) and employ him, and the Canton colony of his birth. His father, an Oxford don, refuses to acknowledge him as his offspring but arranges for him to study at Oxford with the idea of a future as a translator and maker of magical silver bars power by semantics. As Robin comes of age with his friends Rami, Victorie, and Letty, he learns his own history and sees the effects of colonization and opium on his Chinese home.

It’s a long read, 500plus pages, with plenty of details—too much for some readers—but great for anyone interested in linguistics and history. There is betrayal and heinous behavior, adequate character development, plenty of world-building intermixed with real history, and a blunt critique of British colonialism.

This book is about racism, but basically only white-against-nonwhite racism. It barely touches the less obvious white-against-white racism, such as antisemitism or anti-Irish racism as examples. This book could have subverted expectations, while at the same time reinforced its points, by taking a more nuanced view of racism and exploring the topic fully. For me the best part was Robin Swift’s struggle between his growing conscience and his impulse to rationalize his privilege.

The Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Not just a new edition of The Tipping Point, but an all-new work.

As usual, Gladwell brings to the fore stories and bits of research I would not otherwise know about and makes the connections among them: epidemics of crime, suicide, drug abuse, as well as stories of social engineering and social change. As usual, it’s fascinating stuff but Gladwell does tend to overquote and he has the annoying habit (to me) habit of starting and stopping stories in an attempt to build connections among ideas. I found myself forgetting details of the earlier stories just as he was returning to them.

 

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