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Patients with aphasia often retain some forms of speech. While the French physician Jules Baillarger first described the phenomenon in writing in the mid-1800s, John Hughlings Jackson popularised it through a series of articles in the Brain.1–3 He distinguished propositional speech, or a meaningful arrangement of words, from non-propositional speech, which fails to communicate anything beyond feelings.1 His definition of aphasia, therefore, was the loss of ability to speak propositionally. Common examples of non-propositional speech are curses, interjections or jargon used indiscriminately across contexts. For instance, Hughlings Jackson recalled an otherwise ‘speechless’ patient who repeated the phrase ‘yes, but you know’ each time she attempted to communicate.2