ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:
Linguist Julie Sedivy begins her memoir with giant rabbits. We'll get to those in a minute. As a child, she was brought up by immigrant parents in multiple cities, a feral polyglot world, she calls it, ripe with tumultuous unfiltered influences. So there's no wonder she began speaking five languages before first grade. Sedivy writes, what better preparation for this confused and chaotic world than to be left to play in the dirt and run wild with all the languages, all of which became a part of her. Her new memoir is "Linguaphile: A Life Of Language Love," and Julie Sedivy joins us now. Welcome to WEEKEND EDITION.
JULIE SEDIVY: Thank you, Eric.
WESTERVELT: Let's get to those gargantuan rabbits first. That's a sort of a vivid misunderstanding on your part that shows how children begin to learn language. Tell us about that.
SEDIVY: So the event that occurred was I was living in Italy as a small child at the time. I had been born in what was Czechoslovakia at the time and got dragged through a number of different linguistic environments. And as children are, they're just thrown in, sink or swim, which is fine. But as it happened, I made a new friend who invited me into a barn to look at some rabbits. And I must have misunderstood because I was not looking at rabbits at all. It turned out I was looking at oxen, which - I was expecting to see rabbits, so that was quite a terrifying experience.
But it was, I think, indicative of the way that you just kind of grab hold to bits and pieces of language as you can as a small child. Luckily, for me, I had enough new language experiences that I can introspect and remember some of these early experiences of learning language from a very, very fresh beginning.
WESTERVELT: Well, how did this early learning experience compare to when, you know, you were older and learning other languages, including Spanish?
SEDIVY: Well, when we learn language in schools, it becomes structured and regimented, and you progress from simple to complex. As a child, you're thrown right into complex from the very beginning. Also, the social context is very different. Your first languages you learn in the context of your closest, most loving relationships, beginning with your family, and then kind of widen out to your immediate community. So those languages, I think, are just absolutely infused with aspects of your daily life but also all of the emotions that are present within those relationships.
WESTERVELT: In this memoir, you write a lot about the conundrum of having different meanings for the same words? Your list of words upon whose meanings we cannot, as a nation, agree, include threat, hope, injustice, citizen, oppression, pride, heritage, evil, faith, homeland and many more. This is election season, and the nation remains bitterly divided. I'm curious. I mean, is this - you know, beyond the obvious issues of race and class, is this division, in part, a linguistic divide?
SEDIVY: Well, I think the linguistic divide reflects the social divide. Language is learned in a very social context. The meanings that you have for words are the accumulation of your experiences with that particular word. We might be secluded within one community and have less access to another. Those might kind of constrain the meanings that we have of those words, the way that we interpret them and the connotations that we have of them. So I think it's more a reflection than it is a cause.
WESTERVELT: But there are also linguistic divides in families, in relationships, with partners. I mean, that's part of your memoir. It's not just the meaning of words but, you know, how a parent or a partner's use of words leads to misunderstanding, to hurt. I'm thinking of the exchange you had with your mother when you were 12. You were on the cusp of adolescence. Tell us about that.
SEDIVY: I asked my mother, you know, as you imagine as a 12-year-old, with my heart in my throat, Mom, do you think I'm pretty? And her response to me was, it's more important to be smart than to be pretty. And, of course, she didn't say that she didn't think that I was pretty. But you can imagine that the mind of a 12-year-old would have taken that comment and internalized it in a particular way.
So I use that memory as a jumping-off point to explore all the ways in which sometimes we align minds correctly to read between the lines of language, but often, we don't, and that is much more likely if we come from different life experiences, as my mother and I did at that stage of life or if we belong to different cultures with different expectations of what you communicate in words and what you withhold, you know, what is expressed very subtly through other means.
WESTERVELT: I was relieved a bit to read some of what you wrote about the aging brain. I mean, we all fear losing language or the ability to communicate as well. I mean, the tip-of-the-tongue problem of not being able to recall a specific word or a name as instantly as you used to - it's a loss of proficiency a lot of us fear as we get older, but you point out that the aging brain actually has some linguistic strengths. Tell us about those.
SEDIVY: Yes. In a sense, it's a sign of abundance, the fact that we've accumulated much more linguistic material than a young person. So I draw the analogy that asking a 20-year-old to retrieve a new word that they've learned is a little bit like asking them to walk into a minimally furnished apartment and find the one new book that was purchased there.
In comparison to an older brain that has enormous amounts of material, that would be the equivalent of asking them to go into a house in which they've lived in for 40 years and accumulated bookcases full of books, and they might have trouble finding that one particular book. Interestingly, older people really don't show the language deficiencies that you might expect as a result of that slowing, and that's because of the body of experience of language that they've accumulated over their lifetimes. And I...
WESTERVELT: Their libraries are full, and it's full of...
SEDIVY: Yeah.
WESTERVELT: ...Wisdom as well.
SEDIVY: Yeah, and I think that this is just one way in which that accumulation of experience manifests itself and offsets some of the decline that does happen through the process of aging.
WESTERVELT: So you've written about this lifetime of studying words and how people use them. How do you imagine your understanding of linguistics will enrich your older years?
SEDIVY: Well, I think in my older years, it's enriched my entire life, I think. It's made me, I think, a more attuned and alert writer. It's made me take enormous pleasure just in watching or participating in conversations. And as I get older, it, I think, gives me a sense of reassurance that even though language operates under tremendous cognitive pressures, it's also tremendously resilient. We have so many capacities as human beings to connect with each other even when language falters or when it becomes limited. So that, I think, has taken the edge off, for me, the fear of cognitive decline as a result of aging. I really think that there will be endless ways in which I'll continue to enjoy and use language well.
WESTERVELT: And when I can't find the right word or my keys, I'm going to say it's a sign of wisdom, and my bookshelf is full.
SEDIVY: Your bookshelf is full, and you're just having a little bit of a hard time rummaging through it at the moment.
WESTERVELT: Julie Sedivy - her new memoir is "Linguaphile: A Life Of Language Love." Julie, thank you. It was a pleasure.
SEDIVY: Likewise. Thank you so much for having me, Eric.
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