I love words, I love children, and I love the way children stumble toward words then into them, the way they grasp for words and stow them greedily away in the pockets of their minds. I love watching babies wrestle their unwieldy tongues against the still-foreign objects of their teeth to form vaguely recognizable sounds, and I love watching toddlers learn to recall words, control and arrange them, recognize their meaning and willfully draw it from them. I equally love watching older children strive to make sense of the complex, elusive, and alive nature of language. And I find it exhilarating to see young humans—so new to this world— sprinting to catch up to words they thought they knew as they continually catapult between thought, speech, and print. As when my firstborn, Sophie—an avid reader who had, by middle school, acquired a vast working vocabulary from nineteenth-century novels—believed that the word anxiety as she heard it spoken aloud had a twin word only encountered in book…

That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a…

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