By Steve Silberman – Scientific American
My mother taught me to love words. Her dementia taught me to listen more closely
My late father, Donald, an English professor, raised me to appreciate great literature. But it was my mother, Leslie, who taught me to love words. She would sit with me for hours on the couch, pointing to words in books and magazines, and patiently enunciating them, bantering with me in an inexhaustible volley of puns, spoonerisms and goofy double entendres. This wordplay came naturally to my mother, a kind of jazz. It was the music that bound us together through the decades as I became a writer.
