Meaning (continued)

I stopped my earlier post on meaning to check on what had happened to the Red Sox since we left (still safely 8 games ahead of Satan's Horde), and lost my train of thought, leaving the important ending of the post off. Here it is:

The most important experience of meaning without language, of course, has been communicating with Phoebe. While we know a few Russian phrases, our accents have to sound so strange to her that she can barely understand words she knows well. Instead, we have to communicate with her the way all parents initially do with their kids: with tone of voice, and touch, and love -- the emotion for which words are uniquely inadequate.