Language has always fascinated me, both personally and professionally. Maybe my enthusiasm results partly from my poor eyesight, so sound became especially significant. Maybe it’s the connection between language and music that captivated me. Perhaps it’s people’s peculiarly personal spew of words that enchants me. Even the technical term for our individual knowledge and use of language, idiolect, mystifies me.

As interesting as our own language use is more revealingly individual than our fingerprints, language also is shared.