I Hear You Says the Moan

November is Falter season. No longer a beautiful fall, and not yet winter. Prior to the salvation of a sticky first snow, November is a heartless meteorological void. The fiery confetti of fall leaves are extinguished, now ash and mud accumulating in gutters and curbs, soon to be swept away by diligent street cleaners on a mission to make the preordained snow-removal a little less painful for the plows. Unpredictable temperatures conflict with the perpetual stone gray of Falter. Bitter below-freezing or a wet temperate day both look the same outside your bedroom window in the morning. Snow is a merciful release from Falter. A good snow finally hands seasonal ownership over to winter, visually informing folks to put away the vests and hoodies, and start lint rolling the woolens. 

It was late-Falter, an evening of light blowing snow, when I brought my daughter with me to a reading at Magers & Quinn, our beloved south Minneapolis bookstore. Our heroic bookstore, who managed to stand their ground through the gentrification, then weathered the long, awkward degeneration as the Apple Store, the Victoria’s Secret, The North Face, Columbia, H&M, and CB2 all toppled and crawled feebly back to the outer suburbs. Our brave bookstore, whose modest mismatched shelves smell of musty pulp and ink. Whose displays exhibit giftable literary-reference socks next to $1,200 historic signed first-editions under dark wood cases.

As we walked up the sidewalk through the light snow, my 13-year-old daughter shared a heartbreak upon seeing a Snapchat earlier in the day of three close friends hanging out together without her—a betrayal that can puncture even the most socialized of adults. I can only imagine the pain in her adolescent heart. She talked of sharing her feelings with them, and of the clumsy self-preserving retort her friend spewed back at her. We pause outside the glass front door of the bookstore so I can nonverbally communicate to her, “I’m listening. I want to hear you. And we are also now transitioning into a… more intimate enclosed space.” 

But as we stand outside in the wind, listening to my daughter’s heartache, I’m weighing and assessing our next move. Historically I’m a “sustainably-anxious” person. If I have plans, I am going to fret all day about them, and I am going to be on time—to a fault. There must be hundreds of moments from my life—house parties, doctor appointments, first dates, movies, concerts, art openings, dinners, general hang-outs with friends, anything with a specific arrival time—wherein my sustainable anxiety brought me to my destination five to ten minutes early.

Having a daughter spilled my anxiety beans all over the floor and forced me to leave them there. Over these last thirteen years I’ve grown more comfortable changing plans at the last minute, being late, or not showing up at all. Early on, caring for an infant or toddler and trying to keep appointments felt like NASA preparing the space shuttle for re-entry. The coordination of diaper-changing, feeding, dressing, and napping would complicate our planned domestic entry-window into the rest of the world. We would constantly miss it, requiring a re-orbit around our home planet of diapers, bottles, and booties until the next window approached.

  I needed to prioritize my daughter and her needs over my own vapid, meaningless anxious intentions. I’m doing that now, standing outside the bookstore. I made stringent plans with myself to attend this reading. It’s just a bunch of local writers like myself, trying to write and share and build community. I’m here to listen to these other writers, maybe meet other writers, just hang around. Who knows. I’m not reading anything tonight. I’m only a tourist. Nobody at this reading gives a shit whether I show up.

Do I keep this anxious engagement? Should my daughter and I still walk in? Or do I pivot away from the bookstore, down the street and into a warm embrace of a nearby restaurant so I can help my daughter? I quickly assess that my daughter is currently more pissed than crestfallen. About a 5.8 out of 10. I gamble that we can probably continue this conversation for a bit longer inside without tears or deeper collapse. I don’t know if my decision is the right one, but it’s the one I make. I put my arms around her, give her a patient hug, and bring our exterior moment to a close.

  “I’m sorry your friends are being such jerks.” 

I make sure not to excuse her friend’s behavior or diminish her feelings. I turn and catch the glass door as it closes behind a couple entering in front of us, and hold it open for her.

We step inside, quietly sifting past chest-high shelves as she continues to relay the day’s text-based drama through a semi-whisper. I wish her friends understood the value of just saying sorry, as opposed to trying to defend themselves through some bullshit argument about the unspoken ramifications of not sitting at the right lunch table. 

The tight aisles back by the fantasy, sci-fi, and cookbooks are already standing room only for the reading, filled with folks who all reek of writer. Mousy men in tightly drawn scarves, reticent women with slouchy purses, perceptibly non-binary folks with unkempt hair. Glasses, glasses, glasses, glasses. I adjust my own glasses as my daughter and I snake through the outer perimeter and find a wall to lean against. We’re well outside any line of sight to the reader, but close enough to hear someone already reciting an explicit piece about dildos and knives. I lean over and whisper to my daughter, “You don’t have to stay here. You can, like, go check out the teen or the kids’ section if you want.” She quickly abides, probably just as happy to escape from the dildo diatribe as I am to have her not hear it.

A few more writers read their portions, passages, and poems in-progress. During a break in the action, I step away to check on my daughter. I find her kneeling on her coat in front of the Mexican History shelf. 

“Look at this!” She pulls me around to the opposite side of the shelves. She has definitely been able to temporarily let go of her friends’ earlier transgressions. 

“This whole row is about European history,” she flings her fingers down the length of the aisle, “and this whole shelf is just about German history!” 

I note the predominant red, black, and white spines in the German history section and nod. “Whoa.” 

“And then,” we return to where she was kneeling on her coat, “only one shelf for Mexican history!” 

I recognize her frustration and, although heartened by her work pointing out the social injustice in the stacks, I suspect she has conflated Mexico with the entirety of Latin American, and show her the number of shelves above and next to the Mexico shelf that include other South and Central American publications. She gets back on her knees to inspect the new cache of Latin American history books. I think she’s curious to find books about Venezuela, where my father’s side of the family originates. I rub her back, linger for a moment, still kind of astounded by the red and black monotony of book spines in the German section, and return to the reading.

The next reader starts in on their piece written that day about a woman’s depression and loss. I can’t go into details because I don’t remember much. Something about eternal sadness and washing dishes. I have instead become preoccupied by the moaning. It’s a non-verbal sound I’ve heard before, but was never really cognizant of until I experienced it that evening within the muffling eight-foot stacks of mystery novels. As the woman reads, and reaches various poignant, emotional, or vulnerable parts of the text, select members of the audience let out a soft moan. It seemed to be women in the audience emitting this sound. Not all the women, but only women. Maybe two or three moaning at various times.

It’s not a sigh, a sigh is a relief. The moan sounds anticipatory. Maybe it’s more of a coo? It’s made through a closed mouth, in a light, brief, mid-range descending tone of medium length. Like the restful snore of a small dog, or the muffled cry of a distant mourning dove. In my mind it’s a moan, or maybe that previous story about dildos is still churning hard in my head, staining my thinking. The moan feels empathetic, caring, maternal, a snack-size version of the sound a parent might make to their child who just arrived home in tears after falling in a puddle. I think about my daughter. It was evoked at sad parts, after sad ideas, and feeling words. A sad, falling, mid-register coo. It’s a sad moan, but also not defeatist. The moan would be absolutely heartless to emit if a main character died. Although it might be suitable for the death of the family cat—but only if it happened in the first few pages. Because it’s also a hopeful moan, a sound that recognizes damage has been done, but healing is to come.

Writing at my desk, I moan to myself, attempting to verbally replicate the precise tone, length, and accent so I can write about it. Were you doing it too? My daughter came around the corner asking, “Are you okay? You keep making this sound,” and then tried to imitate me. She can’t nail the sound either. She goes too long, too deep, maybe in an attempt to imitate my lower register. She just ends up sounding wild, hungry, and constipated. But any shorter and the moan will land as dismissive, disgusted, or derisive. It is NOT a grunt.

And why were only the women making this sound? I recognize now that I’ve heard this empathetic coo before in other contexts. I’ve heard it emit from thoughtful interviewers in response to guests, in zoom meetings, and from the audiences of live spoken-word performances like this one in the bookstore. At the same time, it also feels new. I don’t remember this moan existing a decade ago. I am blindingly self-conscious of making any kind of statement speaking for women or presuming what any woman thinks or feels. But there’s a listening and acknowledgement inside the moan that does feel maternal and caring. Like my earlier moment standing outside the bookstore with my daughter, allowing space to hear her and recognize what she’s saying. “I hear you” said my body language. “I hear you” says the moan. Maybe the moan is an acknowledgement. But, what exactly is this moan even called? I’m sure some linguist has written a book, right?

I go digging to find someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about, talking about this moan. But I don’t even know where to start. I google for variations of empathetic moan, empathetic moan with quotes around it, empathetic moan reddit. I remember the subtext of acknowledgement within the moan, and go searching for acknowledging utterances with recognizable names. Nonverbal classics like “mm-hm,” “uh-uh,” and “uh-huh.”

I catch something with “uh-huh” and I’m quickly pulled into a cramped rabbit hole labeled “non-lexible vocables.” The term non-lexible vocables is typically reserved to describe the non-word utterances in music, like “la-la-la,” or “na-na-na.” Non-lexible vocables in speech are more in the realm of “uhh” and “umm.” I discovered most of this via a transcript of the podcast The Allusionist, Episode 22: “Vocables.” I did not listen to it because I have bigger words to fry, but you should check it out.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I finally find an answer on Quora. This website Quora often comes up when I’m searching weird questions. I don’t know what happens on Quora. The place feels like a Wal*Mart of the internet. Reddit for retirees. I fear someday on Quora I may inadvertently come across some white-supremacist tirade hidden inside responses to the question, “What are the black keys on a piano called?” Maybe it’s a wonderful loving internet island, but to me the site smells of off-brand dryer sheets. Nonetheless Philip Brannan—a “teacher” on Quora—taught me that the more precise term for words like “uh-huh” and “hmm” is non-lexical backchannels.

This non-lexical backchannel shit is fascinating. I wonder to myself if I should have chosen to pursue linguistics, because topics like non-lexical backchannels make my heart go all lub-a-dub. (And, no, lub-a-dub is not a non-lexical backchannel, it is an onomatopoeia.) Legit linguists frame backchannels as a means of throwing conversational signals up as to whose turn it is to speak. “Turn taking” is a whole spectrum of linguistic structure unto itself. It rules over how we agree and communicate to each other when it’s someone’s turn to speak, or how someone communicates that they would like a turn to speak. Specifically, my empathetic moan is a turn-taking backchannel known as a “continuer” or “weak acknowledgement token” from the listener, signaling to the speaker that the listener is allowing the speaker to maintain control of the conversation, to continue.

I share my linguistic nerd-fest with my girlfriend Susannah and she tries her hand at the moan. The immediate and heightened state of arousal I experience while assessing the sound of Susannah’s moan are private to me, and not something I am going to get into with you here. She tells me that Michael Barbaro—that prominent host of the New York Times podcast, The Daily, who also for some reason can’t recite the phrase, “Here’s what else you need to know today” without stuffing the last five words together causing the phrase to sound more like, “Here’s… what else… youneeduhnoduhday.”—also often employs the empathetic moan. This makes sense for a podcast host, now that I understand (and you understand as well, right?) that “Mmm…” is a weak non-lexical backchannel acknowledgement token for the speaker to continue with their control of the conversation. Exactly like a quick “hm!” you or I might utter when someone is sharing with us something we earnestly find fascinating and want them to continue to tell us more. 

What has all this Quora and tokenry provided us? Some actual insight. Look at this, our research has paid off. Because I can now get somewhere and search non-lexical backchannel moan. 

This new search brings me to a level of the internet that’s not necessarily the “dark web” but it’s not really the internet anymore. It’s the nerdy boring internet where every link is a PDF to someone’s dissertation with abstracts and multipage bibliography. I’m clicking links with titles I don’t even comprehend.

“Misunderstandings and Ensuring Understanding in Private ELF Talk”

“Collaborative Annotation of Dialogue Acts”

“Multiple Layers of Meaning in an Oral Proficiency Test: The Complementary Roles of Nonverbal, Paralinguistic, and Verbal Behaviors in Assessment Decisions”

The colon in that last one really hits me, as if the author is somehow clearer and more practical in the explanatory second half of the title. All that work to unearth the right words to search for, and I still can’t find any existing writing about the moan. I fear I may have actually gone too far into the internet. Let’s back up.

Here’s what I can assess of my moaning experience on that Falter evening in the bookstore. Like saying “Huh!” as something amazing is revealed to you, or “Uggghhh” as your friend shares with you what happened in the living room after their dog ate a whole chocolate cake, the moan is a linguistic continuer, signaling for the speaker to continue and that the listener has also been emotionally moved. It’s a double-layered emotional acknowledgement token: 

“Please continue + this is how what you’re saying is making me feel.” 

It’s fair to acknowledge the stereotype that a woman is more capable and comfortable sharing their feelings than a man. And so, the women at the bookstore, more comfortable in their emotional vulnerability, were the most comfortable invoking this emotional acknowledgement token. And maybe, just maybe, men (me included) could start to become more comfortable with our feelings by just moaning a little bit more. Just a non-lexical backchannel emotional acknowledgement token or two here and there at the sad parts of a story for starters. Who knows what might come of that.

What I’m really gunning for here is a closer that just might raise a one last acknowledgement token out of you as well, dear reader. If I had previously introduced a family pet this might have been a great time for my daughter and I to arrive home from the reading and find it lifeless on the rug. But the pets are fine. Or maybe all this insight I’m distilling inside of me consolidates into an absolutely loving fatherly thing to say to my daughter. But while immersed in writing and researching, my daughter has now resolved her friend issues. They’re all back at the same lunch table again. After school they’re going to take the bus together to the Goodwill Outlet Bins in St. Paul. And when I pick her up from her friend’s house at 6 p.m., she’s going to breathlessly share with me all that she and her friends dug out from those bins. The crisp white Polo sweatshirt, the crop-top with bluebirds on it, the T-shirt with the muppet Animal printed on the front saying, “Nom, nom, nom.” (Another onomatopoeia, by the way.)

For me it’s priceless fatherly gold. Her friend issues, the hug outside the bookstore, the frustrating Mexico bookshelf, the detailed Goodwill haul. At thirteen, I was such a sad detached shithead I never would have shared this much about my life with either of my parents. My daughter simply talking about her life with me is one of my greatest joys.

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Did it work?

Did you do it? Did you moan?

Okay, great.

Thank you.