It has long been observed that a baby’s first word is typically “mama”. Infant language and child language have been studied in considerable detail for more than a century. As revealed in this piece at Atlantic by Michael Erard the last utterances of the dying have been much less studied:
Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.
Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,†eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.
There have been records of dying utterances for millennia. Onw my favorites is what Charlie Chaplin was alleged to have said just before dying. After a priest performed the last rites, saying “May the Lord have mercy on your soul”, Chaplin is said to have responded “Why not? After all it belongs to Him.”
I think that most of the reported last words of the famous are fictions—words put into their mouths by others. As it turns out, hospice nurses have reported that what many people say at the end is “mama”.
The focus in the hospice is to maintain functionality so they may get to hear some last words. In the hospital they mostly say nothing. I also think that most of these are made up.
Steve
I’m just starting chapter 3. The book is engaging and very well written. I’m not going to comment for now except to say that the review does not do it justice.
My aunt was dying and she repeated the same nonsense syllable, bah,bah,bah,bah,bah, on and on. I spoke to her once, and she answered me, lucidly, then went back to the chant.
Probable just distracting her thoughts.
Edison thought an important use of his phonograph would be to record the last words of the dying. I doubt its use for entertainment even entered his mind.
BTW, according to my mother my father’s last words (he flew with the 15th AAC) were ‘no more war! no more war!” As good as any last words ever spoken.