The Polysemy of Love

In modern English love has become a very restricted word. I've been taking polls this last week and found some interesting results. Though it could have a multiplicity of definitions, we often use love for just three: 1) love for a significant other, 2) love for family and 3) love of objects, which would be better expressed using a verb like treasure than love, but oh well, we do it anyway. Love must be clearly understood in its usage or it can lead to embarrassment, teasing and awkward silences. Hence the only way we commonly use love in addressing a friend is when we treasure them more like an object or simply appreciate having their company. (e.g. Two friends talking to one another about a third friend. One exclaims brightly, "Man, I love that kid.") We often restrict ourselves to words such as like, simply so that a usage of love won't be misunderstood. Even 'I care about you' is taken to mean the same as the full-blown 'I love you' in most cases, as a phrase of complete and sole dedication, which stops people from using it. And let's not even touch the complete phrase 'I love you.'

Why is love such a treacherous polyseme in English? We have words like affection and charity, but we wouldn't say 'I affect you' or 'I chare you,' because affect means something different and chare isn't really a word. Treasure sounds funny (I treasure you), and we only hear appreciate on rare occasion because it doesn't really mean what we're trying to say. It is as though English employs no way to specify one's love without a complex, explanatory sentence or a whole heap of awkwardness to go with it. What's wrong with this broken language? Why are we so afraid of love?

Maybe we just need more words for it that help us better express our feelings. In Greek there are words like storge, philia, eros and agape, which demonstrate types or levels of affection and love. Hebrew has seven words for love--I'm told anciently it had more--and Chinese has several words too. In fact most languages I've studied have multiple words (verbs specifically) for love that define it to a specific degree. So why not English?

In Vagan, there are seven words for love. However, they are different than the seven words of Hebrew. Vagan love words all share the same root, three characters best anglicized as 'chez'. A differing vowel syllable added to the first of the root gives chez its proper meaning. For example, as we learn from Zarrys in The Kingdom and the Crown, ochez (oh-chez) is equivalent to the singular dedication and affection--the love--found in a relationship between husband and wife. And whereas achez (ay-chez) would express the type of love one has for a friend, uchez (oo-chez) would imply the love of a child for its parent and awchez (aw-chez) the love of a parent for its child.

That's just four of the Vagan words, and already we've alleviated part of the stress love is under in English. So maybe we need to dig into the English past and find some words that have been long forgotten. Or maybe we need to create some new ones. Or perhaps we could simply grow up a bit and cut the belief that the word love is only a proposal of sex or marriage, which is how most people I polled this week would take it if a friend told them they loved them, especially a friend of the opposite gender. Maybe one of those changes would help balance things out. Or maybe I'm just up in the night and everything is fine just the way it is? What do you think? How do you feel about using the word love? Comment below and let's talk.