[Last Post]

If you’ve been a regular reader of this feature of the online Chronicle and have been following the last week of posts, you’ll already know that the curtain is coming down on Lingua Franca.

Each of us who write the column has been stepping up to say thank you and goodbye. Now it’s my turn.

I never planned to be a columnist, but the six-plus years I’ve been here have taught me a lot about language. Not just the language-y things I picked up from colleagues with vastly greater knowledge of linguistics than my own, but what you learn from thinking about how words work in the world, historically, culturally, socially.

Language is endlessly interesting. And why shouldn’t it be? We’re made of it, the way we’re made of star stuff (thank you, Carl Sagan). It’s what we live with, but it’s also a kind of life, on its own, in itself, and in us.

I guess a lot of you feel much the same way, given the attention with which you’ve read and supported Lingua Franca over the years.

I’ve poked around in the columns I’ve written, and grinned at the recurrence of materials and interests: the Oxford English Dictionary, student writing, 17th-century English lit, a certain presidency, German culture, Broadway shows. They were never meant as a constellation, but I can see that they became an armature for ideas about how we use and think about language.

Which for me is another way of saying how we think, and how we simply are.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the variety of styles and sensibilities that Lingua Franca has offered you. In my case, you’ve been patient with more than one post that begins with one thing, changes focus quickly, and swings back to where it started. Posts that, in retrospect, sometimes have the shape of little essays, little stories. I’ve enjoyed telling those stories — these little dramas — about language.

All right, since you insist, here’s one last look from the digital stage out to you in the digital audience.

At the end of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (yes, you’ve read it, and yes, you might even admit that it’s one of the wondrous things in American theater), the recently dead Emily speaks with others buried near her in the Grover’s Corners cemetery. They’re just as real as life.

Emily’s talking to Mrs Gibbs, her mother-in-law. Mrs Gibbs is dead, too. They sit in simple, straight-backed chairs on an otherwise empty stage. Our Town’s Stage Manager looks on, as he does throughout the play.

I’ll shift just one word of the exchange between Emily and the Stage Manager as she takes her last look back.

EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize language while they live it? – every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No.

Pause.

The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.

Saints and poets. That sounds about right, though the rest of us have our inconsistent moments of attention, at least from time to time. I’ve enjoyed my own inconsistent moments with you.

A special thanks here to my wonderful, indefatigable editor Heidi Landecker, and to her colleagues Mitch and Carmen, who helped me make these words appear. A farewell to the other Lingua Franca writers, too – Lucy, Ben, Geoff, Anne, Allan, Jeffrey, Ilan, Amitava, Carol, C.S., Roger, and Rose. This really does feel like closing a show.

So that’s all from me. Thanks for reading.

Hm. … Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. — You get a good rest, too. Good night.