Michael Erard on Words & Ritual

Michael Erard is a linguist and author based in the Netherlands. His book “Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words” is out now. He served as writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and worked as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute. His books "Babel No More" and "Um..." explore language learning and verbal mistakes.

So I have a question, I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine who, she's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. And I borrow it because it's a beautiful question, but I over explain it like I'm doing now because it's sort of a big question. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?

Where do you come from? Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've been writing about that for a long time, that question, you know? I kind of come from a migrant people in the middle of, the American continent and, you know, I have kept moving myself.

So that where am I from is, you know, it's from, I'm from the places I remember and I'm from the places that I write about, you know, very much, I think in between things too. For some time living between Texas and Maine and going back and forth and now between America and the Netherlands and professionally I've always been situated kind of between academia and non academia. So academia and journalism, academia and strategic communications, academia and writing.

And I feel like, you know, for all of that in between this, there's a real kind of productive tension there. When you're in Maine and you come from somewhere else, people say that you're from away and it doesn't matter where you're from, right? I mean, it could be a hundred miles up the road, it could be Saudi Arabia, but you are from away.

And I'm married to someone who is a 10th generation Texan. So she's very much from, and we say that I'm the away part. I'm always looking for the next place to be, the next horizon, you know?

So, you know, that question, where am I from? It's kind of like, where am I not away?

Oh my gosh.

To bend that around, yeah.

Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid when you grew up?

I think I cycled through all kinds of things. I wanted to be a cowboy. I actually knew real working cowboys. I grew up in Colorado as a little kid and knew these old, old guys who smelled like chewing tobacco and coal smoke and menthol, some sort of menthol joint rub. So that was part of it. And then when I was a little older, I kind of wanted to become a child saint. I grew up in a very Catholic kind of setting. And so, you know, of all of the people that were sort of shown to me as models, like dying as a child saint of some terrible unknown illness, blessing everyone for their sins. That seemed like a good career as any other ones.

What's an example of a child saint? That's not something that is part of my experience. What would you have encountered? What would you have been like, oh, that looks like a good gig?

You know, it was the idea of kind of like being a part but being exalted at the same time, you know, and going through these hardships, but always sort of being told, look, your hardships will add up to something that it will be for this sort of greater good or this greater power. But you will not have to endure it for too long because, you know, God is going to take you away before you reach adulthood. Now, looking back, I mean, I think that some of those stories and maybe even my own wish for that was really sort of a fear of losing childhood or a fear of what was going to come next in terms of, you know, puberty and adolescence. And so wanting to kind of arrest it and just skip the rest of it and go straight to heaven.

I identify with that.

Oh, yeah.

Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you do.

So I'm located in Maastricht in the South of the Netherlands, Equatorial Netherlands, as they might call it, where it's so far South, it's not really even culturally Dutch anymore. You know, we're five miles from Belgium on one side and 15 miles from Germany on the other side. And people really have their own kind of thing going on here.

We moved here in 2019, me and my wife and my two boys. We had spent a year here, a year previously, not here, but in another part of the Netherlands where I spent 12 months as a writer in residence at a language research institute called the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. And we ended up liking Europe and liking the Netherlands so much that we decided to stay.

And then there was a job that came up here at Maastricht University in 2019. So I'm now a funding strategist and funding advisor for the faculty of law at the university, but that's really my kind of day job while I was working on a book about language across the lifespan or really these two storied moments that are sort of shrouded in mystery and ritual and expectation or nothing at all, which is the first words of babies and the last words of the dying.

This book has just come out. It looks amazing, right?

It's gonna be out in like two and a half weeks.

Before we get into the book, I'm just curious about the places you've mentioned. What do you sort of love about where you are? What do you enjoy about that part of Netherlands?

The language aspect of it, having to be in the face of not just Dutch but having to encounter my own kind of limits as a multilingual person, that's frustrating, but I also love it. And it's also a place where there's a local language that's not Dutch at all called Limburgish, which has different varieties spoken in different places. It's really not a standardized form of it.

And people are very proud of it. And people are very, they sort of wave it around as something that they do and that nobody else does at the same time that they kind of don't want you to have it either. They sort of reserve it for themselves. So I really like that sort of feeling around language and being around multilingual people. The food is really interesting. The landscape is gorgeous. And I like the access to all of these other countries.

When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of linguistics thing?

I'm still waiting to discover that, I think.

No, really?

Yeah, I mean, I finished my PhD in 2000, but very quickly discovered that I didn't wanna be an academic, that I wanted to be a writer. And there was this, it was clear, there were a lot of stories to tell. There were a lot of outlets for telling them. And it looked like it would be possible to just be like a magazine writer, right? I mean, and in 1999, of course, everything was gonna be possible, right? So I lived that life for a while, and then I finished, and then kind of promptly almost starved to death.

And the friend that I was telling you about before, he was one of these people who was also riding that wave. And he was kind of on my shoulder going, hey, man, you have so much stuff already, because I'd published in a couple of magazines and some national outlets. He said, with all the stuff you have, you don't need to be cooped up in a university, trying to get tenure, you can do whatever you want.

And I felt very much inspired by that and went running. But the big discovery for me as a humanities person was like the business side of things, and to go, oh, I need a business model. And it was actually some artist friends in Austin who taught me that, like you may believe that you are, that it's no knock on your creative practice or your art to put food on your table.

And so you need to figure out a business model that's also a sort of temporal model, something that gives you an amount of income that you need every month, and then lots of other time and psychic energy to do the work that you're here to do. So probably for 24 years, I've been creating that model, trying to keep it together, trying to put it back together when it falls apart, and so forth. So all in service of, I think, writing the things that I wanna write and going to places with linguistic topics that the discipline of linguistics doesn't typically go.

So my second book was about people who are able to speak a lot of languages or who claim to be able to do that. And there are people who are on a daily basis, very multilingual, speaking five, six, seven, eight languages, but there are people who claim to have two dozen and there are historical figures who claim to have many more. So like, what is that phenomenon?

And it was something that linguists never took seriously, even though there were many linguists who themselves were these kind of famed language learners, guys who would get on the plane with a guidebook, with a language book, and land in Finland, speaking Finnish or something like that. And so I found that super fascinating and kind of dug into that. And then the new book, which is about language at the beginning of life, which linguists are oriented towards naturally, but also language at the end of life, which no one has ever treated at all in any kind of systematic way. So I'm the first to take that up as well and kind of inventing a linguistics of the end of life.

What, where did you begin that process? Like, how did you go about, what was the research experience for this book?

Well, I mean, one joke is I had to kill a lot of people. No, there were no people that were harmed in the process of doing this. I mean, and you would maybe expect a book like this to be written by someone who has a lot of experience in hospices or palliative care or as a chaplain or something like that.

And there are some very beautiful things that are written sort of from that experience and from that perspective, but I didn't have that luxury. And also I think wanted to benefit from a different kind of experience and from a little more distance, I think. And so for the end of life stuff, what I did was I locked into a historical dataset from the very first clinical study of the dying process that was ever done by this really interesting and very famous Canadian, who spent a time at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the late 19th century into the early 20th century.

And he was interested in whether or not when people died, whether they experienced any discomfort, physical discomfort, psychological discomfort, spiritual discomfort. And he had an idea that they just sort of slipped away peacefully, but he felt the need for some evidence for this. And so he directed doctors and nurses to be observing people's deaths in these wards and over four years collected observations on nearly 500 deaths and wrote out very sort of, very plainly some sort of checked some boxes on these note cards that he had, which are in an Osler archive at McGill University.

And it was pointed in the direction of these by a medical historian named Tom Lequeur. I met him at a conference and I was describing to him what I was interested in and saying, it's really hard to get data about. It's not like there's reliable stuff about this.

If you ask people to remember things, it's very biased. If you just wanna know what happens normally, you know, particularly not just what people say, but how they use other parts of their bodies to communicate, you know, which we do during the rest of our lives. People don't like stop being, you know, language users that they're socialized to be just because they're dying, right? But their function changes and their ability to use these different modes changes and starts to degrade.

I follow that. Can you help me understand what are you talking about when you talk about the use of the body changing at the end there?

Well, I mean, nobody can see this, right? I mean, we're talking, we're using our voices. Nobody can see this, but I'm also like using my hands and you're nodding your head, which is sort of encouraging me to keep going in a particular way. And so when you talk to people about their experiences at the deathbed, you hear all of these other kinds of experiences with, you know, what someone does with their eyes or a facial expression or what someone does with their hands, you know, being able to touch someone, squeeze hands and how that changes, you know, over time. And even how people don't communicate anything, how there's silence, right? And not the silence that comes from a lack of presence or a lack of awareness, but it's silence that is intentionally communicative, right?

Like, I'm not available for that question. I'm not gonna answer that and so forth. And then all of the experiences where people are trying to produce some sort of language and can't, which puts people who are with them in the position of then, you know, wishing that they had, you know, gotten, you know, what was exactly going on. And also put in the position of having to interpret things that aren't exactly clear, they're fuzzy, they're not articulated or they might be delirious as well. So they're not sensical, you know, they're not part of an interaction that seems to be about this world and the things that we know of this world. So if you ask people, you know, about an experience at the deathbed, sometimes they'll talk about, you know, what someone said, you know, what they vocalized.

But they won't, and maybe they'll talk about other sorts of gestures, but they won't necessarily link those in time and talk about how far that was from someone's actual passing or how close that was to say when they came to hospice or something like that. So if you're, it kind of creates a, there's a shapelessness that sort of results from that. And an inability to really understand what is normal about that experience.

And I really felt for myself that the kind of cultural models that I had about what happens at the end of life, as far as language goes, were just really uninformed. I'm a modern person in the sense that I really haven't experienced very much death and dying, not up close, right? It was always something that was sort of reserved for other people.

You know, it was someone else's job to do. And, you know, I was on the outside. And I think even if you sort of have some experience, there's a much broader range of things that can happen that don't necessarily get described. They don't get described in terms of the broad range of what's possible there. And so the book was partly about wanting to, I mean, you can't say a menu because you can't choose it, but sort of a cataloging of all of the different phenomena that might show up. So in this historical dataset, there were doctors and nurses who just as a, you know, sort of bycatch of their main research project were writing down things that people said or other kinds of behaviors that they noticed that were about interaction or that were about communication.

So I use that as the basic dataset, not in terms of talking about frequencies of, you know, certain kinds of phenomena, but all of the phenomena that do exist, right? That do occur. Like, let's talk about each of those things. And the phenomena that I went into it expecting to find a lot of was talking, but there in fact, wasn't very much of that. Yeah, there were something like four speakers who were quoted directly and another 12, whose, you know, speech was noted as having existed at all. And, but the larger, the largest sort of descriptions, there were people who were described as, you know, delirious or irrational or raging, you know, or things like that.

The greatest number, the most frequent description was that deaths were quiet, which is really interesting. Both of those things, the delirium and the silence are really hard to write about. Or, I mean, you could almost write a whole book about, you know, each one of those because the question, a number of questions arise. Is it intentional? What is the level of intentionality that goes into the production of these? Where is the person, you know, in this, in these phenomena?

And what are the people who are interacting with them to do with what they're interpreting? And, you know, to what degree is it consistent with the way that they've understood the person previously, if they knew the person sort of, if they knew them well, and so forth. So that's, that kind of, that dataset kind of formed the core of that part of the book.

And then it was going out and talking to chaplains, chaplains, end of life doulas, medical interpreters, and other people about things that they had seen and how they dealt with certain kinds of situations. And then, you know, as soon as I say, I would just randomly tell people, this is the book that I'm working on. There were always, there were stories that would come. I would never ask someone for a story of a last word and would only ever kind of deal with it if it was offered to me.

How did you describe the book to them in that moment? How did you introduce your project to them?

I mean, it was really, you know, it's a book about the first words of babies and last words of the dying and how different cultures and different historical periods have attached meaning to those moments of language. And they are hugely different across cultures or they can be, and sometimes not even important at all. I think that's the thing that is shocking.

I think the one thing that typically that shocks people the most when I tell them about the book is the idea that there are some communities that do not actually pay attention to the first words of a baby. That surely they must happen, right? But if anybody sort of notices them, it's like, ah, it's not a milestone.

It's not an event. It's not a moment at all, right? And they're certainly not paying attention to the child in a way that suggests they're expecting that thing to happen, right? And yeah, so-

What do you make of that?

What do I make of that not happening or people being surprised?

I guess, what is a culture like that isn't looking out for the first word?

I mean, so those kids, it's a culture that knows that those kids are gonna grow up to be users of the language and to whatever degree they need to, right? They don't have any anxiety about that. So I think that's one broad thing. Another thing is that there are other milestones. There are other developmental milestones that matter to them. So for instance, there's a really lovely kid's book about the Diné group in the US, the Navajo, for whom the first laugh is actually really important.

And the person who kind of provokes the first laugh from the baby is said to have a kind of spiritual connection with them and throws a party for the community in order to mark that moment, which is something that first words don't really even get. I mean, they get what, a Facebook post or something like that. But you can imagine that a group that's oriented around trying to make babies laugh means there's a lot of interaction and a lot of people, a lot of grown people doing funny things in front of a baby is trying to make them, to try to delight them, right?

So there's that. And a lot of the communities are, it sounds like they're agricultural. So there's just not a lot of time.

If there's a baby, the baby, they put them on their back or they hang them up somewhere. There's someone watching them, but they're not getting the kind of face-to-face child-directed speech and interaction that people like me think is normal.

Yeah. Yeah, how did the research change you in a way? What did you, how did it shift the way you think about, I mean, you're, yeah, did it provide you insight into what it means to be American or?

One of the biggest ways that it changed me was a kind of shift from apprising the individual thing and the individual's production to appreciating the ritual. So I kind of started out with this notion that when people, particularly parents, say, oh, my baby's first word was mama, that those people need to understand that they are projecting their own kind of expectations onto the baby's babble and extracting that out. And the first word as a moment lies somewhere else, right?

And then it was actually when I was looking at the last words stuff that this all changed. So most of the literature that we've had about language at the end of life has been in this mode of like the famous last words that someone, that a famous person says. The witty thing, the eloquent thing, the sudden thing, the idiosyncratic production that marks the passing of an individual person in their time, you know, and that kind of honors their mortality in a way.

But I went, but that's not the only thing that happens because I know there are traditions where you're supposed to say the same, you're supposed to say something, right? You're supposed to say the name of a God, right? Or you're supposed to say a prayer or a confession of faith or something like that.

Christians have it, different denominations of Christianity have it, Muslims have it, Jews have it to varying degrees, Hindus have it, Buddhists have it, and all of this is very historically determined and very geographically varied as well. So it's not like, you know, Christians have been doing this same thing for 2000 years or something like that, or that Muslims have been doing this all over the place or whatever. So there's a lot of variation.

So you can't kind of say that this is essential to the practice, but it's important for a lot of people, maybe even more people than for whom it's important to hear that individual special idiosyncratic thing. And I went, wow, I think I need a way of talking about this because it was entirely upending my sense of the individual production versus the thing that everybody did.

I found a really great framework by a group of scholars who wrote about ritual and the nature of ritual, who have a kind of framework for talking about the as is, so the way that things actually are, what they also call sincerity, which requires a certain kind of bravery and courage, and it's this imperative of modernity to see things as is, like as they really are, which also has a critique of ritual as being empty and hollow and robotic and repetitive and therefore meaningless, right? But they reconceptualize ritual as the construction of subjunctive worlds.

So the as if, right? And this is not just the realm of religious ceremonies and things like that. Many aspects of our everyday lives have this kind of quality. So I greet someone at the door and say, please come in, I'm so happy that you're here. I say that even though, as if I am actually really happy to see them, but nobody calls me out on that and says, no, no, no, you don't really mean that, right? And I don't in the back of my mind say, well, I wish I didn't have to be lying there, right?

So our days are shot through with this as if, with this creation of these worlds in which things are as if, and that that is not actually hollow and robotic, but that it is a way of maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic world.

Well, I'm so deeply excited about everything you're saying right now. And I wanna know more about who this group you're referencing with this framework, and then also to confirm that they call as is sincerity. Can you tell me more? That seems like such a striking description of that, of as is.

So I can't name all of their names, but one of them is named Adam Seligman, who was a sort of anthropologist of ritual, but there was a psychiatrist, there was a Chinese, a sort of Asian studies scholar and somebody else. And I can't remember their names. And then I'm sure that you're asking about sincerity. I'm sure that they have some discussion of kind of the etymology and why they link that to the as is, but I can't get that right now off the top of my head. Yeah, but so they sort of, why does the sincerity part of it strike you?

Why? Yeah. It seems, yeah, why does it? As is, sincere. Yeah, I guess maybe it doesn't, but it seems incongruous in a way. It felt very innocent or delicate or sensitive in a way that I didn't expect for, you were describing it as kind of a realism that felt maybe harder.

Yeah, maybe we don't think of sincerity as having a sharp edge, right? In the way that the as is

certainly must.

That's nice though, that sincerity, to give sincerity kind of a sharp edge, as you say, or a force that I don't usually associate with it is really, it's powerful.

Yeah, yeah. And probably in the history of that word, it does have these connections to something that is more kind of demanding of actuality and therefore has a sharp edge. So one group of people who were, and I was one group of people who were kind of famous for being radically sincere were the Quakers. So the radical Protestant group who would not greet someone on the street because why should they wish someone good day if they didn't know that person and didn't actually want to wish them good day, that it would be a lie for them to say something that they didn't know when they didn't know the person. And they also wouldn't make oaths to kings and things like that because, so you couldn't, there was no as if world, there was no as if world that you could create in that worldview.

So what is, if as is is sincerity and there's a boundary to that for the Quakers, what the as if, what's the word for as if?

That's a ritual.

Oh, yeah. So this, I have to bring this up because often as a researcher, and I think you know this cause you've practiced, right? That often people want to talk about empathy, but when I'm asked about empathy, I always talk about awkwardness, that the space between people, when the script kind of falls away, where you were describing it before, right? We act as if, when we don't know how to act is when things get really awkward, right? And that space. So what you're describing is there's just an overlap and I just wanted to get your, how do you feel about the word awkwardness and the idea that awkwardness happens when, I always looked at the etymology that awkward means really sort of turned the wrong way around. You're kind of going in the wrong direction and we don't know how to, there's no script. We don't know how to act as if in any given moment. So we kind of have a little bit of a panic attack. I always think about awkwardness as like a mini panic attack because there's no script. We don't know how to act as if. And maybe we don't feel sincere or we don't know what is.

But I would think, I mean, as a writer, the times that have been awkward, where I've been awkward, but where someone else has been awkward have been moments of truth, right? Because what then happens is you see, well, are people going to admit the awkwardness and sort of say it as it is? Or are they gonna scramble around for some kind of script, for some sort of other thing to inhabit that feels more comfortable? And when they do, what do they reach for? So putting people in, like pushing them to the awkwardness is to where their own automaticity breaks down, that that's when you're getting to something that's usable.

Yes. Is that how you- 100%, yes, yes, much more clearly put. But yes, that you do, it produces the opportunity for, I don't know if it's exactly right, but sincerity or something realer, something meaningful.

Yeah, so I don't know where I'd have to think about how as is and as if kind of would come together in a discussion about authenticity and like authentic presentations of self and all of that. But you were asking me about how writing the book, how I changed through that. And I think that I came to a much deeper appreciation for the as if and the construction of the as if.

And I learned to not be dismissive of it and to also understand how my own personal history had kind of put me on a path towards embracing the as is to the exclusion of the as if, and that there were limits to sincerity, that there were things, there are things that happen that require the creation of a subjunctive world where I can, and that that becomes the most productive place for some sense-making.

What does it mean to live more in a subjunctive world when you're to embrace that more? What are the implications of that?

I mean, I think part of the implications is that you kind of, you start to think about the way that I do it is to think about cyclicity, and to try to mark some of the regular patterns and passings of time and activity. So, it's only in the last couple of years that the family has said a blessing to start dinner and that that kind of marks a way of this was then, now is now, we're here together. And I mean, there's still kids at the table, so there's still like orcs flying through the air, but there's a kind of boundedness to it that it didn't have before.

So, I appreciate that quite a lot. And I'm fascinated by the ritual last words and how people navigate and negotiate the fact that on one hand, you have an ideal that you're supposed to perform, or that provides a model for what you're supposed to be shooting for anyway. And on the other hand, that physiologically, you may not be able to do that thing.

So, how do you, as the person who's supposed to be saying the name of God, but can't do it, and other people who are expecting you to say that because they wanna know that your soul is gonna go to heaven and not to hell in circumstances where you can't meet the ideal or you can't meet all of the ideal or what's the negotiation there between those things?

And I think I've been, so you asked about the change, I think in the family, been much more, okay, how are we gonna integrate these different aspects of our training and our lives? We're secular people, we're not particularly religious, but we do things in a particular way for a particular reason in order to mark seasons and in order to mark like the solstice say, we've adopted for the past many, many years, we've had a ceremony marking the 12 days before solstice, not in any like overtly like pagan way or non-Christian way or anything like that, but just to kind of come together and reflect on this time and it's become a really, really special time so that the kids are even like, hey, are we gonna do that again tonight? Are we gonna do that thing? So that's been a big change.

We have a little bit of time left and I wanna shift gears a little bit. I wanna talk about metaphor. Well, I guess I have one big question just as a linguist, what do you feel like you carry with you or what are you sensitive to that sort of non-linguist people, do you know what I mean? What insight do you have or carry with you that other people don't? And then I'd love to hear you talk about metaphor.

I mean, so I think one thing that I have that other linguists don't necessarily share, like other linguists wanna make everybody a linguist because they think the world would just operate much better if everybody understood how language actually works.

That's so interesting.

I mean, it would indeed solve some problems but there would still be some on the table. But I think in language, what I hear is people trying to, I mean, again, people struggling with their own ideals. You know, their own ideal linguistic productions. Like I work in an international setting with people whose native language is not English and people are, you know, the Dutch have beautiful English, like fantastic English, but everyone's always apologizing. Like, oh, my English is not good enough, you know? And so that's very interesting to me or the kinds of disfluencies that people use, the ahs and the ums that you get into these corporate settings or business settings.

You're probably familiar with lots of how to speak, how to, you know, how to communicate, kinds of guidance which says, well, you shouldn't have these things in your speaking without understanding why are they there and what do we need them for? You know, like they're there for a reason and we notice them, count them and dislike them for other reasons, right? The reason that they're there has something to do with the language system and the way that our processing and perceptual systems and our production systems are built, right?

So it's the culmination of a long evolutionary process. Our preference for speaking that doesn't have disfluencies in it, that's entirely historical and social. That's an aesthetic sort of choice. There's no like natural preference for those kinds of things. So that's one thing that I wish that non-linguists would understand about the way that people talk. Yeah.

And metaphor, really hitting on all of the, yeah, metaphor. So in some ways, the book about first words and last words, it's just a giant metaphor. It's taking two things and saying, look, how can you take aspects of one thing and kind of map them onto the other, see this other phenomena through this one particular lens or this one particular window and then flip it around and look the other way.

Beautiful. Well, I wanna thank you very much. This has been like a lot of fun. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing the story about this book and I'm excited to read the book.

Yeah, thanks so much for the invitation. It was fun to talk about the book. This is actually the first real occasion that I've had to talk about the book with somebody and I appreciate getting to talk about aspects of it at length with you and have it tied to some of the other things that I've written about.

Yeah, beautiful. Awesome, thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks Peter.

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