Bye Bye I Love You - by Michael Erard (Hardcover)

About the Book

"An exploration of the first words and last words of life, written by a linguistically-trained trade author"--

Book Synopsis

A beautiful and intimate exploration of first and last words--and the many facets of how language begins and ends--from a pioneering language writer.

With our earliest utterances, we announce ourselves--and are recognized--as persons ready for social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death's embrace. In Bye Bye I Love You, linguist and author Michael Erard explores these phenomena, commonly called "first words" and "last words," uncovering their cultural, historical, and biological entanglements and honoring their deep private significance. Erard draws from personal, historical, and anthropological sources to provide a sense of the breadth of beliefs and practices about these phenomena across eras, religions, and cultures around the world.

What do babies' first words have in common? How do people really communicate at the end of life? In the first half of the book, Erard tells the story of first words in human development and evolution, and how the attention to children's early language--a modern phenomenon--arose. In the second half, he provides a groundbreaking overview of language at the end of life and the cultural conventions that surround it. Throughout he reveals the many parallels and asymmetries between first and last words and asks whether we might be able to use a linguistic understanding of end of life to discover what we truly want.

Review Quotes

"Care for the dying resembles nothing so much as care for the newly born. This deep, immeasurable connection is precisely what Michael Erard, a linguist and historian, most wants to explore. 'With our earliest utterances, ' he writes, 'we announce ourselves' and are recognized 'as persons ready to participate in social life.' With our last sounds, we carve out a space for leaving it. Bye Bye I Love You follows both of these journeys, searching for what these words--and our desperate need to hear them--reveal about their meaning, our mortality and the ephemerality of being human."
--The Wall Street Journal

"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. The end must come; unrealistic expectations about final messages need not."
--The Economist

"Erard's most essential point is that the recently born and the about-to-die share a state of signifying that is just beyond words"
--4columns

About the Author

Trained as a linguist and historian, Michael Erard has spent more than two decades sharing compelling stories about language, languages, and the people who use and study them. He is the author of two previous books, Um . . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, which has been translated into eight languages. He is a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and is training to become an end-of-life doula. Find out more at www.michaelerard.com.