Michael Erard
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michaelerard.bsky.social
Michael Erard
@michaelerard.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.5K following 4.4K posts
Writer, linguist. 3rd book: BYE BYE I LOVE YOU. The Economist: "Beautiful & strangely comforting." LARB: "Wise & gracefully written." Others: "Indelible." To buy: https://bit.ly/4kN0PKa

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michaelerard.bsky.social
Data from that study, encoded on cards for each death, are at McGill. Some of the cards included observations about language and interactional behavior.

A fortunate encounter with medical historian Tom Laqueur pointed me in the direction of the cards. I'm indebted to him.
a data card from the Osler study.
November 26, 2025 at 10:23 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
When he was at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Osler launched the first-ever clinical study of the process of dying, collecting info on 486 deaths from 1900-1904.

Osler was interested in knowing whether people die in discomfort: psychological, spiritual, physical.
a sepia photograph of a white man, William Osler, sitting beside a white man lying in a hospital bed
November 26, 2025 at 10:23 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (2025) is the first linguistic look at language at the end of life, including "last words" and beyond.

It explores these linguistic milestones as cultural phenomena across historical eras. The Economist's top 40 book of 2025 (so far).
Bye Bye I Love You cover
November 26, 2025 at 9:40 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2012). Translated into 8 languages. The first & most comprehensive look at the phenomenon of "hyperpolyglottery," or massive multilingualism/high intensity language learning.
Babel No More cover
November 26, 2025 at 9:40 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Um...Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They mean (2007) explores the natural history of speech disfluencies ("uh," "um," sentence restarts, etc.) and slips of the tongue. Inspired by George W. Bush's profile as "verbal blunderer." I wondered: what is "fluent speech" anyway?
cover of UM
November 26, 2025 at 9:40 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Happy World Linguistics Day! I write about #language in the key of narrative non-fiction; you might find my books interesting! A thread --
#lingsky #langsky #linguistics
November 26, 2025 at 9:40 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
More last words than first words for a while. Maybe forever.
November 24, 2025 at 6:48 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
I have a co-authored, peer-reviewed chapter in this newly released book! With Laura Chahda, and drawing on my research for BYE BYE I LOVE YOU, I wrote about linguistic considerations at the end of life, aiming to show how speech-language pathologists can support communication. It's important!
November 22, 2025 at 7:05 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
In the new Onze Taal, @fonolog.bsky.social had this to say about BYE BYE I LOVE YOU: "One of the most human and moving books on language published in 2025." And about me: "Probably one of the best language writers working today."

Full Dutch and English in the alt text.
Dutch: Erard zocht het allemaal uit, in een van de menselijkste en ontroerendste boeken over taal die in 2025 zijn verschenen. Erard is waarschijnlijk een van de beste schrijvers over taal die er momenteel zijn. Een boek dat voor een belangrijk deel gaat over de naderende dood, lijkt misschien niet heel gezellig. Maar door zijn presentatie en fonkelende stijl maakt Erard er een menselijk en tegelijk leerzaam verhaal van. English: Erard explored it all in one of the most human and moving books on language published in 2025. Erard is arguably one of the best writers on language working today. A book largely concerned with approaching death might not seem very pleasant. But through his presentation and sparkling style, Erard transforms it into a human yet instructive story.
November 22, 2025 at 4:41 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
the first slide of my presentation. on a bright orange field is the cover image of my book, and the title texst, "writing, revising, rewriting and re-revising Bye Bye I Love You Michael Erard Undergraduate Writing Center UT-Austin 10 November 2025"
November 10, 2025 at 2:20 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
I laughed. This is in Austin, Texas, a place not known for its rain. (I live in the Netherlands, where floors and umbrellas are apparently tougher.)
A stand in a building lobby in which hang long clear plastic bags with the words “please keep floor dry…wet bag” with an image of an umbrella between the words wet and bag
November 9, 2025 at 7:09 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
pink. When you do the top and bottom colors as the poles of a gradient, you get this.

thanks, @mitpress.bsky.social designers!
a color field in which a sky blue at the top grades into a pink at the bottom
November 6, 2025 at 12:14 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
color theory on a book cover

I just noticed something cool about the cover of BYE BYE I LOVE YOU: for slides I'm creating (for a talk in Belgium in December), I pulled colors from the cover and realize the lighter color of the YOU isn't in fact silver (as it had always registered to me) but
the cover of my book. the top of the title is dark blue, while the lower parts of "you" are lighter colored. in context (and against the white) that light color looks silver.
November 6, 2025 at 12:14 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
A white man lying on a wooden floor, Inside a taped crime scene outline of a body,
November 4, 2025 at 8:55 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
November 3, 2025 at 1:07 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
i started writing a little thing about biking and couldn't resist making this image
a motor map of the brain, which is mostly circular. there's a face and open mouth at three o'clock, a large hand at two o'clock, and a trunk and legs that extend backwards to about ten o'clock. at nine o'clock i've placed an icon of a bicycle
October 31, 2025 at 10:00 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
In BYE BYE I LOVE YOU I write about the damage that unrealistic expectations for language at the end of life can. do.

Here's one example.

The author is writing about the deathbed vigil his family kept for his father, who was a difficult person and a mystery.
Sure, death seemed to be winning, but our stories put up a good fight. Dementia had transformed his mind into a desert, but I imagined our stories planting seeds that might wake him up. Soon, terminal lucidity would kick in. Soon he would speak. We kept hoping for an ending that would make sense.
October 20, 2025 at 4:58 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
cc @anthonymoser.com
anthony moser's template for "eating the frame": on the left side of the diagram, "kings." On the right side, "no kings." Underneath is a large pink pokemon-shaped character with a wide open mouth saying "Trump doesn't care about the consent of the governed, or the fact it's a bedrock principle in America. We remain governable, but we withdraw consent."
October 20, 2025 at 4:06 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
I can’t read the article because paywall, but the argument here is wrong.
Screenshot of a popular mechanics piece whose title is “the dying utter similar final words. A mysterious shift in consciousnsss may explain why.”
October 18, 2025 at 12:07 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
draw this with wire under the light of a full moon to summon the loas of cyberspace
October 8, 2025 at 7:45 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Here’s a sigil
A silhouette map of the US (sans Alaska and Hawaii) showing the links of ARPAnet in March 1972. The lines stretch between clusters of nodes on each coast
October 7, 2025 at 12:44 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Funny immigrant story. My wife won one of these as a bingo prize last night. Actually, someone else won it but passed her the winning ticket. "I already have one," he said. She tried to give it to other people. "We already have one," she was told. Turns out that EVERYONE has one.
a multilayer grill like contraption in black and chrome metal. the image is taken from an online site. on the top plate are some sausages and vegetables. on the lower plate is an egg and some white substance, perhaps cheese? the staged appliance also has four wooden paddles and two black trays for inserting on the lower plate.
October 5, 2025 at 10:11 AM
michaelerard.bsky.social
@maastrichtu.bsky.social, where I work, deployed its PR machine in my direction and ran a nice profile of me in the uni magazine. The photo was taken at the Sint Janskerk in front of a massive stone sculpture of a reclining skeleton emblazoned with the words MEMENTO MORI (not visible here)
a white man with a white beard wearing a dark sweater sits at a table, gesticulating about something or other with both hands. behind him are visible the ribcage and legs of a reclining skeleton
October 3, 2025 at 3:10 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
Re Jane Goodall: this bit from a draft of an old Science story of mine about names for research animals. That she was pre-empted in the naming practice got edited out.
The conferring of names makes sense when researchers spend significant time with individual animals, either in captivity or the field. As far back as 1931, the first chimp to be reared as human as part of a study had a name: Gua. Before World War II, a Japanese zoologist named Kinji Imanishi was in Mongolia studying wild horses, research that depended on recognizing individual horses. So he gave them nicknames. In 1948, Imanishi – who is now regarded as the father of Japanese primatology -- began studying a troop of wild Japanese monkey on the Toi-peninsula, where he applied the same nicknaming method. Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall is often portrayed as a pioneer of naming because when she first wrote about the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Tanzania in the early 1960s, her chimp names (Barebum, Paleface, Mr. McGregor, Fifii) were controversial. “I began to recognize some of them as individual and gave them names that seemed to suit them. They are as distinct, one from another, as human beings,” Goodall has written. But Imanishi had named monkeys in the wild first.
October 1, 2025 at 7:38 PM
michaelerard.bsky.social
A new Amazon review of BYE BYE I LOVE YOU that really speaks to its personal impact on a reader
a screenshot of an Amazon book review. five stars, the headline is "beautifully written and researched--and it helped me grieve." the full review goes: Last fall I spent a month caring for my father, who was dying of COPD and lung cancer. As he weakened, I often had trouble figuring out what he was trying to say. I felt sure we were doing everything we could do to keep him comfortable, but it upset me that I couldn’t understand. Bye Bye I Love You has helped me reframe how I think about my interactions with my Dad during his last few weeks. It unpacks the way (first and) last words have come to be seen as significant, and shows how cultural expectations often fail to account for the physical and neurological realities of dying. Reading it, I found myself re-examining my own expectations about what end-of-life should look like, and being gentler with myself. Without the sadness and shame that came from not understanding, I’m remembering the communicative creativity of Dad’s last days. Instead of dwelling in feelings of my own inadequacy, I’m taking joy in his last smile.
September 23, 2025 at 7:46 PM