The Liquid Music of Language

Charlotte Rogers has some concerns about Julie Sedivy’s “Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love.”

By Charlotte RogersFebruary 26, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Memoir & Essay

“IF THERE IS one feature that defines the human condition, it is language.” This pronouncement appears on the dust jacket of the new memoir by the linguist Julie Sedivy, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, but the idea dates back at least to Aristotle, who asserted that what distinguishes humans from other creatures is “logos,” our ability to think rationally and persuade others through language.

If language defines the human condition, then Sedivy is superhuman: she spoke five languages before kindergarten and learned to read without ever being taught how. She expresses the joyful rush of comprehension with a profusion of aquatic similes: learning a new word as a child is like catching “fish” amid “flashes of substance and meaning in the liquidity of language flowing all around [her].” Sedivy traces the human lifespan through the prism of language, from the way newborns suck on a pacifier more vigorously when they hear their mother tongue to her own sensual pleasure at sucking on beautiful words “like fruit drops” and the surprising ways vocabulary continues to grow in old age. Linguaphile is a passionate and occasionally zany paean to Aristotle’s logos, roaming freely over literature and the science of language acquisition. These meditations occasionally converge in hilarious ways: at one point, Sedivy imagines linguists in a lab fitting Virginia Woolf with an eye-tracking helmet to observe how the writer’s vision would show her nimble mind parsing a word’s multiple meanings.

Linguaphile makes unconventional insights into the gendered aspects of communication. Organizations like Toastmasters International often caution against the use of ostensibly tentative language, namely “filled pauses” (hesitant sounds like “ah” and “um”) and “uptalk” (a rising intonation at the end of a sentence), which are often attributed to women’s verbal habits. Sedivy, however, shows that men engage in the same linguistic behaviors but are nevertheless perceived as authoritative speakers. The problem, she reveals, is a misogynistic “presumption of competence” for men but not for women. Sedivy concludes: “As with the sartorial dilemmas that women face, it is no easy matter to calibrate the appropriate force of authority in one’s voice for the particular occasion; one could spend hours paralyzed in front of the linguistic closet, obsessing about the correct mixture of power and femininity.” This profound statement enables readers to recognize the shackles of gender expectations, in language as in other practices of everyday life.

Sedivy is a vigorous, even dogmatic proponent of the unfettered mixing of languages, contrary to the regimented silos of American monolingualism and “foreign” language instruction. Her observation that children “sop up” language without the strictures of grammar is certainly accurate, but I laughed incredulously when she called Sesame Street “a children’s program that blatantly propagandizes the dissection of speech into segments that can be crammed into the alphabet.” Could Cookie Monster’s “C is for Cookie” routine really be a linguistic version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will? Yet I’m inclined to indulge Linguaphile’s hyperbolic statements because, like Sedivy, I too am a linguaphile, a language professor enamored with the possibilities of words.

A recent diagnosis in my family, however, has caused me to question the very premise of Sedivy’s book. My mother has a rare neurodegenerative disease eating away at the language centers of her brain. Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) begins with a growing inability to read, write, speak, and understand language; eventually, it develops into dementia. Unlike the more common kind of aphasia caused by a stroke, tumor, or brain injury, PPA is irreversible, untreatable, and terminal. Faced with the bleak future ahead, I find myself returning to Aristotle’s privileging of logos: does a person’s humanity really vanish with the loss of language?

Sedivy’s descriptions of how language breaks down as the brain slows with age are both technical and lyrical. She likens understanding a long, complicated sentence to completing a relay race:

Acoustic signals must be matched to words stored in memory, which, once retrieved, serve as batons to be passed on and assembled into the latticework of syntactic structure, which in turn must be passed on so that its full meaning can be deciphered. But over the span of every segment, the baton has a time limit; it can survive in memory for only a short time before it dissipates into smoky wisps of nothingness.

Anyone can lose track of meaning in this way, either as part of getting older or by becoming distracted in the middle of a sentence. The average listener will piece sense together in this fleeting cognitive gap. Yet these days, I see meaning dissolving into smoky wisps for my mother in every conversation. She understands the beginning of a story just fine but loses the thread after a few seconds; she often asks me to remind her who I’m talking about when I finish an anecdote. Other times, she begins a sentence of her own only to have the intended meaning vanish from her mind. Her sense of shame and frustration at not passing that neural baton is palpably painful.

Sedivy calls aphasia “the Worst Thing That Could Happen, the one loss I’m not sure I could bear.” As she describes it, “no other disease […] drains a life as efficiently as aphasia.” I myself was rendered briefly aphasic when reading these lines, left speechless by fury at the callousness of Sedivy’s words. My mother now lives in what Sedivy describes as a “Kafkaesque nightmare,” as do the two million other people living with aphasia in the United States. For all her careful research, Sedivy never actually speaks—or, better yet, listens—to anyone who has aphasia. To be fair, she does cite from the best book yet written on the subject—Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names For Love (2011)—but Sedivy describes an aphasic as “a member of a separate species” and recovery efforts after a stroke as “a lesson in the resilience of language and the human spirit.” These opinions do not accurately reflect my family’s experience of living with aphasia.

Losing the ability to read, write, and speak presents obvious and frustrating utilitarian challenges: ordering food in a restaurant, keeping in touch with an out-of-town relative, doing anything at all on a smartphone. And yes, there is an existential terror to aphasia. PPA entails an inexorable loss of access to the imaginative worlds of literature, film, and theater. I’m not sure what it does to the inner realm of private thought, but I was shocked to learn that many aphasics’ dream lives evaporate following their injury, stroke, or brain tumor. Mom admitted to me that she has no recent memories of dreaming. The incremental nature of PPA is excruciating: just when I get used to my mother’s current limitations, another decline in cognition or word-finding leaves me devastated.

The worst part of aphasia for me right now, however, is watching our fast-paced world run roughshod over people who just need a bit more time to communicate. According to the National Aphasia Association, 84.5 percent of the American population has never heard of aphasia, let alone considered how they might accommodate an aphasic in a conversation. The diagnoses of Bruce Willis and Wendy Williams in the last few years have given the aphasia community greater visibility, but there is still a long way to go in making the disease as recognizable as conditions like Parkinson’s or cerebral palsy. Even my mother’s neurologist, who is fully aware of what PPA is and does, talks to her much too quickly, a disrespectful approach that stems from our medical system’s need for speed. Slowing down, looking the person in the eye, and asking yes or no questions are the best ways to communicate with someone with aphasia.

These are easy instructions to give but hard ones to follow. As someone who walks fast, talks fast, and gets more than her share of speeding tickets, I am all about velocity. I once dropped out of a meditation group because I failed utterly to adhere to their motto: “Just Stop.” This, in fact, has been the unexpected grace note of aphasia: it has forced me to stop rushing, to be present, to accompany my mother in her daily life without multitasking. In a recent meeting of our aphasia support group, an affable man with a brain injury said with effortful clarity: “The world needs more people with aphasia, not less.” Sedivy intuits the benefits of slowing down when she movingly describes lingering at her brother’s deathbed with her siblings, the surprising communion between them as he became unable to speak. Can we incorporate this insight into our own lives before they end?

Amid Linguaphile’s many rich descriptions of language learning, I was left wondering: What are the right metaphors for unlearning it, little by little? Is it like language acquisition in reverse? After childhood, Sedivy writes, “we can no longer live in language’s liquid, musical state. We can’t tolerate it when meaning is withheld from us.” Yet this is exactly what PPA is all about: the disease withholds meaning from the brain. Does language sound like music to my mother? Is her mind becoming more liquid but with meaning flowing away from her rather than toward her? At the moment, the most apt aquatic metaphor for Mom’s condition is the tide, since her language is best in the morning, with only halting gaps that can be filled in with context, but much worse in the afternoons and evenings, with meaning falling apart entirely, her speech sometimes reduced to spluttering. She flounders in the murky waters of her brain, unable to come up with a single fish. This aspect of aphasia fills me with panicked urgency just when I am trying to slow down. What are the right questions to ask now while she can still answer? Can I say “I love you” often enough, hoping she will continue to feel the words even when she no longer understands them?

Reading Sedivy’s book, I felt by turns exhilarated, exhausted, and enraged. In stylistic terms, Sedivy’s ebullience is at first infectious and then overwhelming. Since any constraint on speech seems to her an unjust imposition of an Orwellian linguistic state, she lets figurative language fly with wild abandon. The proliferation of metaphors—words described as “disembodied wisps,” “a boiling stream,” “Xs on treasure maps,” or “life rafts”—at first delighted and then depleted me. Part of being a good writer is knowing when to withhold language, how to use the silence, the power of the weighty pause. Linguaphile inadvertently reveals the virtues of elision when Sedivy lets it drop, on the last page of the book, that her husband died of cancer as she was finishing it, “a literally unspeakable loss that would leave my brain feeling as if one of its hemispheres had been removed.” Rendered aphasic by grief, Sedivy lands on a fitting metaphor for death, the definitive end to human connection.

As I accompany my mother in her loss of language, I know Sedivy’s worst fears are misplaced. I am connecting more, not less, with Mom as she loses the ability to speak, read, write, and understand words. Our new language has become gestures, hugs, and eye contact. We are sharing new sensory experiences by moving slowly together. There are moments when Mom is captivated by small pleasures that she and I would both have previously blown right past. The comfort of dedicating ourselves fully to rubbing a dog’s belly, the way she clasps my shoulder and points excitedly when she spots a cardinal in an otherwise drab winter landscape—this might be how we communicate going forward. Or, more likely, it will be a time I look back on fondly: remember when she could pet the dog, when she could identify birds? This thought used to terrify me, but now I know that love can deepen surprisingly without words.

Julie Sedivy has deep knowledge of how language works and strong opinions about how it should be wielded, but no linguaphile—not me, not Sedivy, not Shakespeare—has any greater access to humanity through language than anyone else, despite our linguistic dexterity. Language doesn’t belong to us; we are simply lucky that it passes through our minds and lips more fluidly than it does for other people—for the moment, at least. Linguaphile may set out to describe how language defines us, but by the time I put the book down, I knew that the Worst Thing That Could Happen is not losing language; it’s losing love. Connection, the essence of the human condition, doesn’t rely on logos after all.