Deborah Cameron (whom everybody who knew her even slightly called “Debbie”) is the smartest, most well-attuned, most level-headed, and sensible person I have ever met. I know I should write “was the smartest, most well-attuned, most level-headed, and sensible person I have ever met” because she tragically, incomprehensibly, enragingly, is no longer with us. Right now, though, only a few weeks after her passing, those past-tense words seem too raw, too stark, too close to the bone. They also sound too final and also wrong because Debbie is still with us. She will always be with us through her extraordinarily perceptive writing and in the memories of her that anyone who ever spent time with her will hold and cherish forever. I met Debbie sometime in the mid-1990s, when she was visiting New York University. I was working there at the time in the anthropology department as a visiting assistant professor. Like most sociolinguists, I had read Feminism and Linguistic Theory and Verbal Hygiene, and knowing that she was in the same city as me, I did something I never before had done nor have done since: I wrote a fan letter. I cannot remember what I wrote, but amidst the gush, I must have timidly proposed meeting up for a coffee. She consented, and we met. I had no idea what she looked like (remember this was before one could just type in a name on Google), but of course I knew that she was British. Being acquainted from her books with her laser-beam perception and her biting wit, I think I expected her to look like Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: sharp-boned, tight-bodied, prim. I also assumed, based too on the authoritative, no-nonsense style of her writing, that she must be at least 20 years older than me. I was wrong on both counts. She turned out to be a robust lesbian, only a few years older than me, dressed not particularly fashionably and with a short haircut, in my memory almost a buzz cut. She smoked a lot. She liked to drink. She enjoyed swearing. We hit it off immediately. What I loved about Debbie from the first moments of our first conversation was her laugh. It was a raucous, infectious combination of a cackle and a guffaw. And contrary to my expectation that she might be decorous and stiff, she laughed readily and with gusto. Our conversations, from that first coffee in the mid-90s to my final conversation with her by phone, 30 years later from Hong Kong, right before Christmas 2025, were always animated by laughter. I could always make her laugh, and she always made me laugh. After she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, soon following that conversation in December, I never had an opportunity to speak to her again—her partner, Meryl, who remained by her side constantly, told me daily that she never felt well enough to converse by phone or online. My biggest regret is that I was not able to make Debbie laugh at the end. I know I could have done it. God I miss her laughter. I also deeply miss her perspicacity, which is a word I probably learned from her (she used words like that with ease. “Supercilious” was another. And “pusillanimous”). I do not know how she did it, but she always managed to cut straight to the heart of any issue and could dissect it with the skill of a seasoned neurosurgeon. She did this consistently in conversation and debate, and her writing is remarkable for the ease with which she first explains, then either dismisses or complicates. Re-reading what unexpectedly turned out to be her final book, The Rise of Dog Whistle Politics, I am once again dumbstruck by the incredible grace with which she wrote. It is all so seamless and smooth. It is reasonable, unassailable. It seems effortless. The truly amazing thing is that I really think it was effortless. She was a prodigy. For many academics, including me, writing is a chore. It never gets easier, no matter how many times we do it. Each time I begin a new article or book, I feel like I am starting from scratch: I wonder whether I still even know how to construct a simple grammatical sentence, let alone develop a coherent argument. I do not know where my text will go or how in the world I ever will manage to get there. Writing together with Debbie (in the early 2000s, we co-authored Language and Sexuality), perhaps needless to say, was daunting. She is the only person I ever have met who could sit down, light a cigarette, and start writing a text that within a few days would be an almost completely polished book chapter: She was a goyish Hannah Arendt. A similar feat took me several weeks, at the very least. During the period we were writing that book, she was always waiting for me to finish the chapters I was writing; I was always struggling to catch up with her. I will always struggle to catch up with her. At one point in our writing of Language and Sexuality, when she got tired of waiting for me to finish a text—and Debbie was never one to hide her impatience and coddle and coo in bland encouragement—she magisterially offered me two valuable pieces of writerly advice, which I since have found extremely useful. The first was “Sometimes you have to sacrifice detail for clarity of the narrative.” The other was “Just sit and write what you are thinking, fill in the references and the summaries of other people's work later.” That, I realized, was how she worked. When I say that Debbie was a prodigy, I mean that literally. Beethoven heard entire symphonies in his head and then just wrote them down. I am convinced that Debbie saw entire books in her head and then just sat down and wrote them out. How else can one explain her immense productivity? Practically every time I spoke to her, she mentioned that she had another book coming out. Sometime during the 2010s, I lost track of them all. But whenever she sent me a copy, I always read it with the exact same sensation of astonished delight with which I read Feminism and Linguistic Theory in the 1980s. She consistently dazzles. Debbie was a forthright person who did not suffer fools gladly. She said what she thought and if people did not agree with her (which happened a lot and which never surprised her—her academic writing, after all, was largely targeted at people she assumed did not agree with her. Her goal was to convince them otherwise), she engaged them in careful, respectful, serious debate. She loved discussion and debate. She was a master at it, and it energized her. Perhaps her greatest sorrow in recent years was the restriction of debate that has occurred in public discourse and the academy. In typical Debbie style, she engaged with that development in The Rise of Dog Whistle Politics. She laments that so many people on the progressive left seem “so insistent on looking, not for the meaning another person is trying to communicate, but for something in the form of the message that can be used to accuse them of malfeasance.” And she ends by observing, “As more and more emphasis is put on stamping out ways of using words which are said to be oppressive, manipulative and harmful, there is less and less space for the idea that language is a resource which enables us, despite our differences and conflicts, to connect with one another, to find common ground and to co-operate in pursuit of goals we share. To my mind, that more positive way of thinking about the power of language is as important for progressive politics as the other. The danger is that if we cannot reclaim it, we will stay where we are now—arguing about symbols on the sidelines or purging dissenters from our own ranks while those with real power make decisions that oppress and endanger us all.” As always, she hits the nail precisely on the head. If I were to suggest a summary of Deborah Cameron's oeuvre on language, it would be that language matters, but it matters in ways different from, or other than, the ways many people seem to think it matters. Sometimes it actually does not matter at all, and the froth that people work themselves up to—people from rightwing demagogues to advocates for progressive movements and also, to her absolute glee, nutty people like the man who showed up at her office one day dressed as a potato, asking her to endorse, in her capacity as professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, a protest launched by the British Potato Council against the term “couch potato”—that froth, and the anxiety, energy, rage, and time that people expend on wrangling about esoteric details concerning language, might perhaps better and more productively be spent on other things, such as engaging in practical political action that frankly challenges “those with real power who make decisions that oppress and endanger us all.” Debbie Cameron was (that shift in tense there is hard) a brilliant, innovative, incisive thinker. She was an exceptional, indefatigable, masterful writer; an unwavering, thoughtful, engaged feminist; a committed and gutsy public intellectual. She was also an incredible baker and a fantastic cook. She was a fan of Dolly Parton and the Eurovision Song Contest. Debbie was mighty. Losing her is a gargantuan, gaping wound to sociolinguistics, to feminism, to voices of reason everywhere. For those who knew and loved her as a colleague, a teacher, and a dear, dear friend, the loss feels almost unbearable.
Don Kulick (Mon,) studied this question.