When her father was dying, Lisa Smartt noticed he was using poetic and at times nonsensical language, speaking of green dimensions, an upcoming art show, and angels who told him he only had three days left. Stirred by his speech and drawing on her linguistics background, Smartt dedicated four years to analyzing over 1,500 utterances made by people at the threshold of death. “Do consistent patterns emerge in the language of the end of life? And if so, what exactly are those patterns and how might they track the path of consciousness?” she asks in Words at the Threshold: What We Say As We’re Nearing Death (New World Library, 2017), the intriguing results of her inquiry. The publisher kindly sent me a copy for review.
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Mashed Radish 