Sondheim's Usable Language

On the portability of Sondheim’s lyrics | Plus, our weekly crossword & more from our conversation with Sherz Aletaha

In January of 2025, Sondheim Hub readers were invited to share lyrics that mean a lot to them personally. The responses were moving in their variety, and moving, too, in their consistency. Across countries, ages, professions, and circumstances, people returned again and again to Sondheim for language that had lodged itself deeply in their lives.

It’s not surprising that readers of this particular publication hold Sondheim’s words in high esteem. But what so often shines through, in any discussion of the lyrics that mean the most to us, is not just love but utility. His words become equipment for our lives. We can talk endlessly (and boy, do we) about the beauty or the wit or the technical sophistication of his work. But today, consider something just as keenly felt: the capacity of certain lines to detach from their dramatic source and continue to work in ordinary life. To become, as it were, portable.

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The most literal form of that portability is ritual. The lyrics we respond to most deeply can become folded into the ceremony of life. And ritual language has to survive repetition: it must mean something the first time and still mean something the tenth. Andy Twigg-White described proposing with a pocket watch engraved with the words “Marry me a little?” and later walking down the aisle to a piano arrangement of the song. Their rings, he wrote, bear initials from the same lyric. Sondheim’s language has entered the marriage itself: the proposal, the wedding, the object worn every day thereafter.

Elsewhere, readers wrote of lyrics they return to in bereavement or separation, lines that help them speak about the persistence of love and presence. “Sometimes people leave you / Halfway through the wood” became, for a reader in London, a way of holding onto the fact that grief does not simply end a relationship but can transform it. The utility of a lyric like this is, I think, born of that fact that it is emotionally precise without being sealed. Such lyrics arrive from a specific character in a specific dramatic situation, but they are phrased in such a way that the specificity becomes a door rather than a wall. You enter through the character’s feeling and find your own on the other side.

They also become a way of instructing the self.