Bye Bye I Love You. By Michael Erard. mitPress; 344 pages; $32.95 and £30
BABIES COME into the world seeking out comfort, so their first word is often “mama”.It is easy to say and reflects the bond of mother and child. Meanwhile those leaving this world often make a philosophical statement, reveal a long-hidden truth or even utter a witticism. “Either those curtains go or I do,” Oscar Wilde supposedly said on his deathbed.
All this, including Wilde’s quip, is dubious, argues Michael Erard, an American journalist who has written several books about language. In “Bye Bye I Love You” he dismantles many long-held beliefs about utterances at both the beginning and end of life. He finds first and last words to be similar in many ways—such as how they are created by expectant listeners as much as by their speakers.
Sounds like mama and dada or papa recur in many of the world’s words for “mother” and “father”. But about as many parental words lack these common sounds; in some languages the word for “mother” features rare consonants that children master only later. “Mama” is what Mr Erard calls a “cultural first word”, fussed over by those who have learned to look out for it or even elicit it from little ones.
Things are very different elsewhere. Among the Beng people of Ivory Coast, a baby is not supposed to utter his first word too precociously. To do so is a bad omen, involving a “cosmic rebalancing”, and a grandparent might die in compensation. Among speakers of Tayap in Papua New Guinea babies are expected to be defiant; people listen out for “oki” and “aiata”, meaning “I’m getting out of here” and “stop it”. A similar belief holds among Samoans, for whom “tae” is expected to be many babies’ first word, short for “ai tae” (“eat shit”).
In industrialised societies early linguistic development is big business. Unusual and varied early words are meant to be a sign of a gifted child who will reap the rewards of being brainy later on. Baby books encouraging parents to report on their children’s first words made their appearance in the late 19th century along with an increasingly professional, managerial approach to parenting—child-rearing as optimisation. Rich-world parents are thus keen to elicit speech from their children as early as they can.
Mr Erard is not the first to point out that industrialisation has changed not only childhood, but old age, too. Medical advances in wealthy countries have led to more protracted declines and deaths at older ages; in earlier centuries violence, accidents and catastrophic illnesses claimed many young, otherwise healthy people.
That has had an effect on last words. Popular culture has conditioned loved ones to expect some final truth or profundity in the last utterance of the dying. But moments of sudden lucidity, with clear, meaningful and memorable last words, are very much the exception in those who die today (and offer reason to be sceptical of many of the famous last words collected in anthologies). By far the most common process by which people die in the modern rich world is a slow breakdown of physical and mental faculties, “neurochemical commotion” that gradually robs people of the ability to say anything at all.
Indeed, in another link between first and last words, Mr Erard argues that dying people lose their verbal faculties in a way resembling the child’s language learning but in reverse. Though language acquisition is well studied, language attrition is not. Mr Erard is elegiac as he describes glances, hand squeezes and gestures, and the sometimes upsetting cries, moans and delirious talk that are often the final communication of the dying. This is why some cultures—many Hindus and Muslims among them—prepare and practise declarations for the moment of death long before it arrives. (Christians once did so, too.)
A book ending with so much death may sound like a hard read. Instead, it is a beautiful and even strangely comforting one, with Mr Erard as a pensive, patient guide. (He is training to be an end-of-life doula.) The end must come; unrealistic expectations about final messages need not. ■
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