The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

something to be lightly dismissed. This talk is the crucial ingredient. This is the way that the genetic memory of speech is being imprinted on a new practitioner.
    Baby talk, which is full of rhyme, is really the way you learn to figure out what's like and what's not like, and what is a discrete word, or an utterance, and what is just a transition between two words.
    How does it happen? Well, it happens gradually, and it happens by matching. Matching within and matching without. First you have to learn that a certain feeling in one part of your body, your tongue, matches with a certain feeling in your brain, which is a sound. A slightly different feeling in your tongue matches with a different sound coming out of your mouth and a different sensation of muscular control registering in your brain. Each subtle difference of sound feels different. And this is all very difficult and takes lots of trial and error and babbling and drooling and lip popping and laughing.
    Of course, you're doing a lot of random sudden things at that point. Your eyes dart left. Your fist suddenly goes boing! Sticks out. Head swivels. Whoa. Back arch. Leg. Sudden diaper squirt. Things are happening everywhere. And each one of the things that happen, the random little twitchy things, sends a message to central control that feels a certain way. So you begin to correlate. And your mouth turns out to be probably the most important piece of the pie. When you cry you get results, and when you suck you get milk, and when you go "Nnnnnng!" the face above you smiles and goes " 'Nnnnng,' what do you mean 'Nnng,' you funny little baby?" Reflecting it back.
    And you start to see that all these sounds that you can make--ngo, merk, plort--that you begin to hear, can be classified in certain ways. You're a newborn brain, you've only recently come out of solitary confinement in the uterus, and you're already a cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park. You're already parsing through, looking for similarities and differences, looking for patterns, looking for beginnings and endings and hints of meaning.
    E SPECIALLY BEGINNINGS . The beginning of a sound is usually a moment where you forbid the sound to be produced. With your lips. Puh, buh, bluh. Or you attempt to dissuade it gently: nnn, mmmm. You put some sort of barrier or seawall there, and then you remove it to allow the sound to unfold itself briskly into a vowel. Unfold the vowel towel and floom it out and let it settle on the sand. Flume, broom, room, spume, gloom, doom.
    So you've got the beginning, which is generally a consonant, and then you've got the middle of the sound, which is often a vowelly region. And then you've got the end of the sound. And all these things are difficult to make out. We know from speech-recognition software how hard it is for a computer to figure out where things begin and end. It's like looking at the horizon and thinking, Is that lump Mount Monadnock or is Mount Monadnock that lump there? Actually Mount Monadnock is pretty distinctive. But sometimes when you look at a mountain range it's very difficult to know what's what.
    Do you care how things are spelled? Obviously not. Spelling? What's that? That's absurdity. That's a whole different layer of opacity--the layer of squirming black shapes on a page. That's years in the future. What you're doing, inside your head, is classing things by sound shape. And by detachable head. And that's where rhyme comes in.
    Think of what happens when you say the word "moon." What does the speech part of your brain do? It says, Okay, assignment: moon. Jaw down a bit, lips together. And flatten. Good. Then commence huffing out some sound. Constrict the vocal cords. Mm. Now open and flute the lips into an O shape. Ooo. Moo. And then terminate by flipping up the bottom of the tongue and lightly caressing the roof of the mouth. Airtight seal. And out the nose. Moon--ah. And you're done.
    That's all your mouth control center knows. It knows a series of muscular